The Catholic Church must not sweep abuse "under the carpet," a top U.N. official said Thursday in unprecedented criticism of the Vatican by the United Nations.
Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said she was "not at all" happy with how the Catholic Church has handled allegations of child abuse by clergy.
"There are children who are now coming forward on this issue and they are still hurting. They need to see justice being done," she told CNN's "Connect the World" program.
On Thursday, the Vatican issued new rules aimed at stopping the abuse of children by priests.
The new regulations give the pope the authority to defrock a priest or hand out other punishments without a formal Vatican trial.
The rules also make it a crime for a priest to download child pornography. And they say the abuse of mentally handicapped people is as bad as child abuse.
Read the statement from the Vatican (in Italian and English)
Child-safety campaigners said the new rules do not go far enough.
"The pope had a chance to do something really decisive that would affect the situation worldwide," said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.
Instead the Vatican issued rules that she described as the equivalent of "bringing a child's sand shovel to an avalanche."
Doyle wants the Vatican to do much more, including ending "secretive tribunals" of priests accused of abuse.
"The church must release lists of credibly accused priests," she said.
Naming suspected abusers "serves a public safety function," she said, and is "not only reasonable, it's absolutely crucial."
It would help victims to have abusive priests named even if they are dead, she said.
"I know a family that was utterly destroyed by the abuse of four siblings" who were all molested by the same priest, she said.
"It tore apart a devout Catholic family. Some of them are not speaking to each other," she said. "It would be of enormous help to them for the bishops just to say, 'We know there are allegations against him.'"
The new rules come in response to thousands of recent allegations of child abuse by priests in the United States, Europe and Latin America.
They deal only with how the church itself handles allegations of abuse, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said.
Church law already orders Catholic clergy to comply with the civil law of the country they live in if they suspect child abuse is taking place, he said.
CNN Senior Vatican Analyst John Allen said the long-awaited guidelines make "relatively minor" changes.
"They take what is already existing practice and make it church law," he said.
He doubted they would satisfy the Vatican's critics.
"The story here is a kind of disconnect between the Vatican, which seems to think that business as usual is enough, and the rest of the world who are waiting for a dramatic symbol of change," he said. "These revisions will likely come across to critics as the Vatican re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic."
CNN's Hada Messia and the CNN Wire Staff contributed to this report.
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