You heard, I am sure, about the Vatican Gendarmerie joining Interpol.
There is a ZENIT story about this.
There is more to this than meets the eye.
For the last year or so the Secretariat of State has been preferring the Gendarmerie to the Swiss Guard. This preference has provoked conflict between the recently fired Commandant of the Swiss Guard and the Secretariat.
The integration of the Vatican police into Interpol signals changes in Vatican City State (SCV – Stato della Città del Vaticano) security, including more restricted access to areas within the SCV and the extraterritorial properties.
There will be more electronic surveillance, including telephone and computer wire-tapping.
There will follow an infiltration into the SCV of Italian and other national security agencies.
The SCV is going to be one of the real security hot-spots in Europe.
Increasingly hotter.
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This is an interesting development. The incursion of foreign security agencies would compromise the sovereignty of the SCV, wouldn’t it? Integrating their police force into Interpol doesn’t necessarily mean that, though there are countries that would argue that a loss of independent sovereignty occurs when joining international organizations of that nature (UN, EU, etc.). Is this just an organic development of the city-state or is there a specific threat they’re responding to? (Those are more rhetorical questions than anything, just putting it out there.)
A sad state of affairs, indeed. I always like to believe in “sacred neutrality”, but I am unfortunately not that naïve.
What to the Gendarmaria look like? When I went to Vatican City there were a lot of mysterious men in black suits and ties ushering people about and very few Swiss Guard about.
Why is it that the protection of the pope when traveling outside Italy falls into the Gendarmerie’s hands and not the Swiss Guards?