POPES and their officials have long benefited from the Vatican’s unique dual status in international law. As the Vatican City State, it can shelter prelates wanted for questioning elsewhere and play host to offshore financial institutions such as the Vatican Bank. But when world leaders visit the pope in Rome it is to meet the absolute ruler of a global entity, the Holy See. As the Holy See, the Vatican engages in diplomacy, holds observer status at the UN and signs most treaties. The Holy See is sometimes called a sovereign entity without territory, although its sovereign, the pope, is also the ruler of the Vatican City State. It is a legal expression of the Catholic church’s leadership, yet American lawyers for the church have successfully argued that the Vatican is not responsible for Catholic clerics’ wrongdoing.

On May 23rd the Vatican’s split personality will be put to a new test when a UN committee releases the findings of an inquiry into the Holy See’s compliance with the Convention against Torture, which it signed in 2002. Most of the questions put to the pope’s representative, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, in the public hearings were about the sexual abuse of children and adolescents by Catholic clerics. If the committee decides it was torture, a wave of prosecutions of historic offences could follow: there is usually no time limit for bringing torture charges, as there generally is for sex crimes. And if it judges the Holy See accountable for priests’ and bishops’ misconduct, victims’ lawyers may challenge existing jurisprudence and demand compensation from Rome.

The Vatican argues that the offences in question, though repugnant, should not be counted as torture. “Clerical sex abuse is an egregious betrayal of trust and a violation of the innocence of the victims. It causes untold suffering and scandal,” says Bishop Charles Scicluna, who until 2012 was the Vatican official chiefly responsible for prosecuting such cases. “But it does not fall under the definition of torture established in the convention. Neither does it fall under the article that deals with inhuman and degrading treatment. The reason is that [both articles] refer to acts committed by a public official.”

But the Vatican’s interpretation exploits its own dual nature. It says its only public officials are those of the city state, such as its blue-uniformed gendarmes. At least one member of the committee disagrees. Felice Gaer, an American human-rights advocate, argues that the convention imposes a duty on the Vatican to prevent a breach by anyone under the “effective control of the officials of the Holy See”.

Whatever the UN committee’s decision, victims say that the Vatican is still doing too little to protect children from paedophile clerics. Church officials maintain that sexual predators are just as common in other bodies that deal with children. But that is irrelevant, says David Clohessy of SNAP, which represents American victims of clerical abuse. “The issue is not how you keep the bad guys out, but what you do when the bad guys surface.” And here, he says, the Catholic church is deficient.

Even if the Holy See is not accountable for the behaviour of Catholic clerics under the secular laws of the countries in which they minister, they are accountable to the Holy See under canon, or ecclesiastical, law. In 2001 Pope John Paul II ordered all credible allegations of abuse to be forwarded to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department once known as the Holy Inquisition. Since 2004 it has defrocked 848 priests for raping and molesting children, and meted out lesser punishments to 2,572 others (usually because they were elderly and defrocking would have left them destitute).

But the Vatican has not obliged bishops to report suspected abuse to the police because, say officials, in some places paedophile clerics could suffer barbaric punishment or execution. This argument hardly holds in, say, Italy—and yet in March the Italian bishops’ conference told its members they had no “juridical obligation” to tip off secular authorities.

Cases are still coming to light of bishops who endangered children by failing to investigate allegations or by moving paedophile clerics to other dioceses, leaving them free to abuse again. Yet the Vatican has refrained from sanctioning them. “The safeguarding of minors in his diocesan community is a sacred duty of every bishop,” says Bishop Scicluna, and episcopal negligence is a crime under canon law. But in America, says Mr Clohessy, “not one bishop has lost a single day’s pay for having put kids in harm’s way.”

That is where the continuing scandal becomes personal—and papal. Only the pope can handle penal cases against bishops under canonical law, so if the taboo against disciplining bishops is to be broken, only he can break it. But whether he intends to is hard to predict.

Allegations of sex abuse against the Vatican’s former nuncio (ambassador) to the Dominican Republic, Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, are being investigated there and in his native Poland. But in January a spokesman for prosecutors in Warsaw said the Vatican had told them that the archbishop had diplomatic immunity and was a citizen of the Vatican City State, which did not extradite its citizens. And in March Pope Francis implied in an interview that criticisms of the church’s handling of the scandal were unfair. But just a few weeks later he appointed Marie Collins, a campaigner who was assaulted by a priest as a child, to a commission he created to advise him on how to deal with sex-abuse cases. Francis’s papacy will be judged on how he treats this running sore.