Convicted IOR directors file human rights complaint over pensions
Two former Vatican banking officials have complained to the ECHR
The Vatican is facing a legal challenge at the European Court of Human Rights over the suspension of pension payments to two former Vatican banking officials, after a series of conflicting Vatican court rulings, and amid scrutiny of financial governance.
The challenge over the payments arises from disciplinary proceedings against Paolo Cipriani and Massimo Tulli, two former managers of the Institute for the Works of Religion, both of whom were convicted by Vatican courts for financial mismanagement and subsequently saw their pension payments suspended.
Vatican pension regulations ordinarily allow for pensions to be reduced by up to one third in cases of conviction, but not eliminated entirely. Cipriani and Tulli initially challenged the suspension before Vatican tribunals, winning favorable rulings at both the first and second instances, which ordered the IOR to reinstate their pensions at a reduced rate and cover legal costs.
Those decisions were later overturned by the Vatican Court of Cassation, which ruled in April that pension payments could not be considered an acquired right.
The decision, signed by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, reversed earlier interpretations of Vatican pension law and fully sided with the IOR.
In response, Cipriani and Tulli filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, which proposed that the Holy See’s actions violate both its internal pension regulations and Article 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects property rights.
Although the Vatican city state is outside the court’s jurisdiction and the EHCR has declined to intervene in previous cases brought against the Vatican via the courts of member states, the appeal still threatens new international scrutiny for the Vatican City judiciary.
Cipriani and Tulli have been at the center of a long running Vatican legal process. A 2022 ruling by a Vatican City appellate court rejected their appeal and upheld an earlier judgment finding both men liable for mismanagement at the Vatican bank.
In a January 2022 statement, the Institute for the Works of Religion said the court confirmed a 2018 decision holding Cipriani, the former director of the IOR, and Tulli, the former deputy director, responsible for financial losses exceeding €40 million, tied to a series of investments made between 2010 and 2013.
While Vatican authorities did not publicly detail the specific acts of mismanagement, the IOR said the investments at issue had proven “immediately harmful,” and in some cases “illegitimate,” and were connected to transactions that later became the subject of criminal proceedings.
The ruling was the first civil judgment of its kind within the Vatican City State setting a precedent, according to the IOR, and was cited by bank officials as evidence of extensive financial reforms aimed at strengthening oversight and accountability within Vatican institutions.
The case has remained controversial, because parallel proceedings in Italy reached a different conclusion. In 2017, an Italian court convicted Cipriani and Tulli of money-laundering offenses, but those convictions were later overturned on appeal, with judges ruling that the alleged offenses had not occurred.
That legal trajectory shifted earlier this year, when the Vatican Court of Cassation overturned the lower-court rulings that had ordered the IOR to resume reduced pension payments.
In an April 2025 decision, a panel of judges largely composed of cardinals and presided over by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi ruled that pension payments could not be considered an “acquired right” under Vatican law. The ruling sided fully with the IOR and reversed the earlier judgments, effectively permitting the bank to suspend pension payments altogether, even at a reduced rate.
The decision showed a departure from the reasoning adopted by the Vatican’s lower courts, which had drawn explicitly on principles common in European pension systems, including those applied in Italy, under which pensions may be reduced following a criminal conviction but not eliminated entirely.
In 2023, as part of a wider move to reshape the governance of the city state and distance its governance from the ecclesiastical structures of the Roman curia, Pope Francis opted to overhaul the court’s composition, breaking the link between the Vatican’s supreme civil and canonical courts’ judiciaries.
Previously, the chief judge of the Apostolic Signatura, the Church’s supreme ecclesiastical court, served ex officio as the head of the city state’s Court of Cassation and was responsible for appointing other judges to the tribunal, almost always drawn from the Signatura’s own roster of senior legal practitioners.
None of the court’s majority of cardinal judges has a background in legal practice, indeed none of the four cardinals has a law degree, civil or canonical.
Following the Court of Cassation’s ruling, Cipriani and Tulli turned to the European Court of Human Rights, filing a complaint in Strasbourg alleging violations of both Vatican pension regulations and Article 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects property rights.
In their filing, according to local Italian media reports, the former IOR officials argue that the suspension of their pensions contravenes Article 28 of the Vatican pension fund’s internal statutes, which state that pensions are not subject to seizure or attachment, except in cases of debt to the administration and only within a limit of one third.
The appeal places the Vatican under renewed legal scrutiny at the European level who has inherited a complex portfolio of unresolved financial and judicial disputes from the previous pontificate.
The current case is not the first time the Holy See has been involved with the European Court of Human Rights, though it would mark a rare return to Strasbourg.The most recent judgment involving the Holy See before the ECHR came in 2021, in J.C. and Others v. Belgium.
J.C. and Others v. Belgium was the civil claims brought by 24 victims of clerical sexual abuse against the Holy See in Belgian courts. These victims were not only from Belgium, but spanning across France, and the Netherlands. They argued that the Vatican bore civil liability for what they described as a “structurally deficient” response to sexual abuse within the Catholic Church.
The lower court rulings in the Belgian courts ruled in favour of the Vatican as they declined to rule over the jurisdiction over the Holy See, citing its immunity as a sovereign entity under international law. The applicants subsequently appealed to the ECHR, alleging that Belgium’s refusal to hear their claims violated Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees access to a court.
In its preceding October 2021 judgment, the ECHR ruled by a six-to-one margin that there had been no violation of the convention, siding with the Belgium courts. The court accepted the Belgian appellate court’s determination that the Holy See possesses the attributes of a sovereign state for the purposes of international law, including diplomatic relations, treaty-making capacity, and recognition by other states.
The ECHR further held that the grant of jurisdictional immunity pursued a legitimate aim, namely, compliance with generally recognized principles of international law, and that such immunity did not impose a disproportionate restriction on the applicants’ right of access to a court.
The court rejected the applicants arguments that alleged failures by the Holy See to prevent or remedy sexual abuse should pierce state immunity, as the judges concluded that international law had no precedent for recognizing a human-rights-based exception to sovereign immunity.
The court also emphasized that it did not see itself as a progressive force in reshaping international immunity doctrine, but rather as an institution bound to follow the existing consensus of public international law.
That precedent looms over the present pension case, though the legal questions involved are substantially different.
Unlike J.C. and Others, which concerned whether national courts could assert jurisdiction over the Holy See at all, the current complaint arises from decisions taken entirely within the Vatican’s own legal system and challenges their compatibility with the convention’s protections of property rights.
This ruling by the Vatican Court of Cessation that pensions are not an acquired right should worry all Vatican employees. If pensions are not an acquired right, then the Vatican can reduce any employee's pension, even without any fault on the part of the employees. If such is the case, then I can imagine that the Vatican will "solve" its pension funding deficit by reducing pensions, even those that employees thought were promised.