Greek Australian legal champion of abuse wants to sue the Pope

Angela Sdrinis is working on a class action against the Ashley Youth Detention Centre in Tasmania, a case which is receiving national attention. For much of her career, Ms Sdrinis took on state governments and institutions in the courts to fight for victims of abuse.

Now she is looking at ways to bring no less a personage than the Pope to the dock to answer for abuse committed on children while under the care of Catholic Church institutions.

“We are putting forward a claim to sue the Pope in relation to the Catholic Church in Australia. The Pope says that as a head of state he is immune to to the many cases against the Church,” Ms Sdrinis told Neos Kosmos.

“We are working on how to serve the Pope. It is a very complicated case and to my knowledge, there has not been a successful sex abuse case brought against the Pope anywhere. We are up against a very powerful institution,” said the director and founder of Angela Sdrinis Legal based in South Melbourne.

She has lodged a claim in court naming the Pope as a defendant. We liaised with Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DEFAT) we could only serve the Pope as a head of state and we are arguing that the decisions he made with regard to our clients were not made as a head of state but in his religious and personal capacity.

She is citing the case of former priest Michael Glennon who was convicted as a child molester. Glennon resigned as a priest in in 1984 but continued to present himself as a priest and conduct baptisms, weddings, funerals and private masses. Allegations of sexual criminal conduct first surfaced against him in 1977 when he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl. Despite that conviction he continued to use his position to abuse children for 21 more years before the Catholic Church formally laicised him.

Ms Sdrinis said the Catholic Church has six times more complaints of abuse than every other church institution and felt that celibacy was a major factor. She noted that while she had dealt with claims against nearly every other church institution in the country, she had not dealt with any claims against the Greek Orthodox church.

Ms Sdrinis said the difficulty in suing churches lay in the way they were incorporated through property trusts which dealt with the properties held by the churches and were not liable for the actions of their clergy.

Many of the cases she had dealt with were against state government institutions because in Australia these are most responsible for the education, health and welfare of children who are wards of the state.

“The children most likely to be abused are vulnerable through poverty and terrible home lives.

“In the past there was a perception that these children were worthless and were not protected. Their parents often had no power to protect them and often were the abusers.

“There is good and bad everywhere and the powerless are doomed to be exploited and abused unless there is a strong system in place. which is what the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse (2012-2017) was about.

“When I started out, a person would go to a police station to report abuse and there was no system to record abuse. The Royal Commission and other enquiries led the police to set up systems and record cases. A national database is yet to be set up. The changes are needed so that it not just about relying on a good parent or a good person (to do right by children in care).”

She said thanks to the Royal Commission’s work there was now a law in Victoria that an adult has a lawful obligation to report a reasonable suspicion that child abuse is taking place.

Child abuse was difficult to stop because it is carried out behind closed doors with the abuser working on the child’s mind not to disclose the act by instilling fear in the child or the belief that it is the child’s fault.

“Some abusers have threatened to kill their victim’s family if they speak. You cannot responsibility on the child to disclose the abuse. This often happens years later.”

In over 25 years of doing this work, Ms Sdrinis had noted progress in delivering justice for the abused and this has been one of the great motivators for her.

“For me it was unfinished business. I had seriously thought of stopping it in 2010 because of illness,” Ms Sdrinis said in a 2012 interview that she had been affected by the cases of abused children who were no older than her own two children, Zac (a lawyer now 27) and Tia (23 who is studying medicine).

“In the early years it felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall. No lawyer wanted to do this as it is bloody hard work. Now there are a lot of players in this area. In the early years it was very hard, thankless work to get results.

“The legislation has changed (particularly after the Royal Commission and other enquiries) and a lot has happened and I am glad I kept doing this work and these successes are what keep you going.”

She said her family originally came from Tsamantas, a village in Epirus that is close to the Albanian border.

“My grandfather Dimitris Zdrenis, left Greece in 1916 for the United States – I went to Ellis Island, New York, and found his name documented there. He returned to Greece in 1924 to be with his wife.” When Dimitris left for Australia his wife was pregnant with Ms Sdrinis’ father, Sotirios.

The Depression, followed by the Second World War and the Greek civil war kept the family apart until 1956 when Sotirios migrated to Australia and met his father for the first time in his life.

Sotirios Sdrinis ran shops but also made a name playing Rebetika in Melbourne. Lambrini, her mother, raised four daughters, Ms Sdrinis who was born in 1960, is the youngest.

“Mum and Dad wanted us to have an education and we all went to university and have taken up professional careers.”

Her father who had fought with the communists during the Greek Civil War, influenced her progressive politics. He died in 2000.

“I started an arts degree at Melbourne University and studied law at Monash. I found articles with labour law film Ryan Carlile, (Needham) and Thomas in 1983.”

She set up her own practice, Angela Sdrinis Legal in 2014 which now employs 40 people in Melbourne and also in Hobart where she opened an office in 2015 where there had been a lot of enquiries about abuse cases and there was no one on the island to deal with the enquiries. She has acted for 350 claimants mainly against the Tasmanian government.

The current class action against the Ashley Youth Detention Centre will be heard under new class actions laws in Tasmania and Ms Sdrinis said the case would be the first of its kind in the state.

“I know Australia is not a perfect country but I am so grateful for what this country has given me. My life would have been very different had I grown up in Greece, which I love, but for a woman born in 1960 there were few opportunities.”

neoskosmos.com