Jailed Cardinal George Pell has been given a final chance to fight his convictions for child sex abuse offences, after the High Court granted him leave to appeal.
Cardinal George Pell is escorted in handcuffs from the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne in August. Photo: AFP
The 78-year-old is currently serving a six-year jail sentence after a jury unanimously found he had sexually assaulted two choirboys while he was the archbishop of Melbourne in the mid-1990s.
Today the High Court granted him special leave to challenge the conviction, without hearing any oral argument.
The hearing is unlikely to happen until next year.
Pell, Australia's highest-ranking Catholic, must serve a minimum term of three years and eight months under his current sentence and has already served eight months in jail.
However, the former advisor to the Pope is in poor health and it has previously been noted in court that he is likely to die in jail under his current sentence.
In December 2018, a jury convicted Pell of sexually assaulting the two 13-year-old choirboys on the basis of evidence given by the sole surviving victim.
The High Court bid was the last chance Pell's lawyers had to clear his name, after Victoria's Court of Appeal upheld the jury's verdicts in August.
The three judges were split on the decision, but the verdicts were upheld in a majority two-one ruling.
Victoria's Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and Court of Appeal President Justice Chris Maxwell found the complainant was truthful and dismissed the appeal.
The dissenting judge, Justice Mark Weinberg, believed his account was "impossible to accept" as it "contained discrepancies [and] displayed inadequacies".
