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Notes -
While I understand that privilege has a precise legal situation, where a defendent themselves can claim it, I don't know if the legislators are thinking of it that way. I believe the point is they want priests to testify, if they find out some accused person has a confessor, they want to be able to compel that priest to testify in court. Not a lawyer, but I suspect you're right, and this wouldn't stand up as evidence in a real courtroom. But Washington wants that power, the legislature despises that religions allow people to confess a serious crime to a spiritual leader without that spiritual leader having to report it. Mandatory reporting rules are probably the ultimate target; apparently there was a court case in Louisiana about that topic.
Of course, the view of the Catholic Church is that priests should be willing to be imprisoned or die, even, rather than reveal something told to them in the confessional. A priest who does it is supposed to be punished severely -- the old Lateran canon said they would be imprisoned, basically, in a monastery for life as penance, and more recent canon law is simply excommunication. The moral theologians argued that a priest should lie and say they know nothing when asked about a person's sins.
Personally, I think this could become an asylum situation. This is probably a strength of the temporal power of the Pope. Before it was abused by economic migrants, the concept of asylum was supposed to apply to situations like this: where the laws of the state penalize or compel activity that it shouldn't against a specific targeted person. I've read that applications for ending the excommunication of a person who commits a sin that incurs automatic excommunication (abortion, apostasy, eucharistic desecration, etc) are often sent in diplomatic pouches. So the principle of the Pope using international law to protect the seal of the confessional is already in use.
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