OTTAWA —
Canadian police said Tuesday a new arrest warrant has been issued for a priest
accused of
sexually abusing Inuit children in the country’s far north decades
ago before fleeing to France.
اضافة اعلان
Renewed focus was
placed on Johannes Rivoire, 93, this week when an Inuit delegation to the
Vatican asked Pope Francis to personally intervene in the case, which has
remained unresolved for nearly 30 years.
The
Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in an email to AFP that last September it received “a
complaint of sexual assaults that occurred approximately 47 years ago,”
involving a female victim.
The RCMP said the
warrant for his arrest was issued last month.
Rivoire, a priest
with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, had spent three decades in
Canada’s far north, before returning to France in 1993. He now lives in Lyon.
Canadian police
had sought to arrest him in the 1990s on at least three other charges of sexual
abuse in the Nunavut communities of Arviat, Rankin Inlet, and Naujaat.
But those charges,
according to
Canadian media, were eventually stayed when it became clear to
prosecutors that France was unlikely to extradite him.
Natan Obed,
president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, told a news conference Monday that he
“raised the legacy of sexual abuse in the church and asked the pope if he would
intervene directly” in the Rivoire case.
He said he asked
the pontiff to press Rivoire to return to Canada to “stand trial for the harms
he has done,” or face a trial in France.
The
Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Obed said, have invited him to discuss the case at
a meeting at its office in Rome on Thursday.
The 32-member
Indigenous, Inuit and Metis delegation was invited to meet with
Pope Francis
over the recent discoveries of more than 1,300 unmarked graves at Church-run
schools in Canada attended by Indigenous children as part of a government policy
of forced assimilation.
Some 150,000
Indigenous, Metis, and Inuit children were enrolled from the late 1800s to the
1990s in 139 of the residential schools across Canada, spending months or years
isolated from their families, language and culture.
Many were
physically and sexually abused by headmasters and teachers, and thousands are
believed to have died of disease, malnutrition, or neglect.
A truth and reconciliation
commission concluded in 2015 the failed government policy amounted to “cultural
genocide”.
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