PARIS, Jan 1: France’s highest court, the Cour de Cassation, decided this week that a religious institution can no longer withhold evidence from the country’s magistrates or police simply by evoking the traditional concept of religious sanctity and claiming that evidence held by the institution is protected by its nature.

According to that idea — the concept of “le secret religieux” — the French justice system, and the police operating under its orders, was until now prevented from seizing evidence that was detained by a religious institution, for example, documents pertaining to a procedure it itself had instated against one of its members.

The case on which the Cour de Cassation — France’s equivalent of the Supreme Court — based its decision goes back to Aug 2001 when police seized documents belonging to the Officialite — the Catholic Church’s ecclesiastical tribunal.

The information seized pertained to the Catholic Church’s own investigation into a rape allegedly committed by an ecclesiastic living at Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb of Paris. And, as a French judge wanted to undertake his own investigation into the matter, he decided to seize the Church’s own investigative files, presuming that the Officialite had been able to obtain evidence to which a French magistrate might not otherwise have access.