George Pell's legal team set to announce High Court challenge

George Pell’s legal team is expected to announce he will seek leave to appeal to the High Court.

Cardinal George Pell leaves the Court of Appeal yesterday. Picture: Alex Coppel

Cardinal George Pell’s legal team is expected to announce that the former high ranking Vatican official will seek leave to appeal to the High Court to have his child sex convictions overturned.

The Australian understands an announcement on the appeal is imminent after the Victorian Court of Appeal yesterday rejected his bid for freedom.

A High Court appeal will be the last chance for the 78-year-old to avoid jail time until at least 2022.

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Pell, 78, failed in his bid to overturn his convictions for sexually assaulting two teenage choirboys when the Victorian Court of Appeal split 2-1, the majority decision keeping the cardinal in jail.

The Vatican says it will let Cardinal Pell exhaust all legal avenues of appeal against his sexual abuse convictions before taking up his case in its own canon law investigation.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni says the decision to hold off on any action is consistent with the Vatican’s handling of other sex abuse cases.

Two senior judges believed the evidence of Pell’s sole surviving victim, whom a jury found was ­sexually assaulted in a sacristy at St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1996 and again at the cathedral the next year while a choirboy.

Chief judge Anne Ferguson said she and Court of Appeal president Chris Maxwell found there was nothing in the victim’s ­account of Pell’s offending that meant the jury must have had a doubt as to the cardinal’s guilt.

However the third appeal judge, Mark Weinberg, disagreed, believing Pell should have been acquitted of all charges. Justice Weinberg couldn’t ­exclude the possibility that some of what the man, now in his 30s, had said was concocted.

Justice Weinberg, a former commonwealth director of public prosecutions, was highly critical of aspects of the former choirboy’s evidence, saying he at times exag­gerated aspects of his account.

While there was nothing inherently improbable about child sex abuse by senior clergy, the victim’s evidence needed to be examined within the surrounding circumstances, he said.

University of Melbourne law professor Jeremy Gans said Justice­ Weinberg’s 200-plus-page dissenting judgment was signif­icant and would be weighed up by the High Court. He said the High Court could decide whether to ­accept the case by the end of this year, possibly hearing it by the middle of next year.