For those interested....
The article has appeared in the Wednesday 5 April 2017 print edition of The Guardian Newspaper.
It appears, in a cut-down version compared to the web article, at the bottom of page 4.
Jehovah’s Witness group loses its bid to block sexual abuse inquiry
A Jehovah’s Witness congregation in Manchester has lost a legal attempt to block an investigation into its handling of allegations of sexual abuse, after failing to convince a judge that the inquiry amounted to religious discrimination.
Groups linked to the religion mounted a legal challenge to prevent the Charity Commission from starting two inquiries into allegations concerned with survivors of sexual abuse being forced to face their attackers at “judicial committees”.
The commission began a statutory inquiry into the Manchester New Moston congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2014, after reports surfaced that a convicted paedophile, Jonathan Rose, was brought face-to-face with survivors of his abuse at a judicial committee.
The commission’s second statutory inquiry concerned the UK’s main Jehovah’s Witness charity, the Watch Tower Bible Tract Society of Great Britain , which oversees the UK’s 1,500 congregations and is believed to play a key role in deciding how abuse claims are handled.
WTBTS launched litigation, including an attempt to challenge in the supreme court the commission’s decision to start an investigation. The charity also fought, in the lower courts, against production orders obliging it to give the commission access to records showing how it handled the allegations, although in January it dropped its opposition to these requests.
Yesterday, at the upper tribunal of the tax and chancery division at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, which hears appeals from the charity tribunal, Mrs Justice Asplin ruled that the lower tribunal had been “entitled to decide that there was no direct discrimination”.
The commission’s head of litigation, Chris Willis Pickup, said: “We regret public and charity funds [were] used on this litigation, but we will continue to defend robustly our legitimate role in investigating serious concerns about charities.”
BTW some nice subbing going on with the headline in the print edition - the online version was headlined: "Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation's efforts to block inquiry squashed"