Friday, October 17, 2014

# 4 How did the British Embassy in Thailand 'accidentally destroy' Mr Fletcher's passport?



What happened to David Fletcher’s passport?

“On June 27th, 2010,  David Fletcher was approached in his Bangkok hotel by three Thais who told him that the British embassy wanted to talk with him. Would they accompany them? Mr Fletcher agreed. The men were not in uniforms and had no warrant for his arrest.

Fletcher accompanied the three Thai men, who took his passport and placed him in a cell at the Immigration Detention Centre in Bangkok.

On Tuesday 29th June, 2010, Ray Keen visited Mr Fletcher in his cell and informed him that he was from the British embassy. 

According to Mr Fletcher, Ray Keen produced his passport (given to the embassy by the Thai police) and said the embassy would look after it for him.

In Dec 2012, when a Thai court recommended that he be returned to the UK, Mr Fletcher asked the British embassy to return his passport. He was told that it had been ‘accidentally destroyed’.

A key part of David Fletcher’s defense against the charge that he raped Yang Dany on 15th and 22nd March 2009 is that he was not in Cambodia in March 2009. The evidence for this, Mr Fletcher claims, is to be found in his passport.

In order find out more about the whereabouts of David Fletcher’s passport, and its fate, I wrote to the British Ambassador to Thailand.  

Mr Mark Kent
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
British Ambassador to Thailand

14th September 2014

Dear Mr Kent

I am an Australian filmmaker, currently resident in Cambodia, conducting research for both a book and a documentary about David John Fletcher – convicted by a Cambodian court in absentia to 10 years in jail for rape.

In the course of my investigations I am gathering together as much information as I can that may be relevant to my book and film. It is, of course, imperative that the documentary be factually correct and that I do not leave myself open to accusations of bias or to being sued for defamation by any of those who, it seems on the basis of my initial research, have either conspired to have Mr Fletcher falsely charged or who have turned a blind eye to such a conspiracy if it has occurred. Hence this exploratory email.

I do have permission from Mr Fletcher to ask the questions I wish to ask and to make observations arising from my initial research. (I provided written permission from Mr Fletcher – signed and thumb-printed.)

My first questions have to do with the role that The British Embassy in Bangkok played in the cancellation and, it would appear, the destruction of Mr Fletcher’s passport:

1. On what date did the British Embassy cancel Mr Fletcher’s passport?

2. Why did the British Embassy cancel Mr Fletcher’s passport?

3. Who made the decision to cancel Mr Fletcher’s passport?

4. Was Mr Fletcher’s cancelled passport then destroyed?

5. If so, why was the passport destroyed?

6. Who was responsible for the destruction of Mr Fletcher’s passport?

7. If both the cancellation of the passport were accidental, why was Mr Fletcher not provided, immediately, with a new passport free of charge?

8. It is the normal custom in the UK, when a passport is cancelled, that the corners and the front page are removed. Why was this procedure not adhered to but, it seems, the entire passport destroyed?

9. Is it legal for any person, including those working within a British Embassy, to destroy the passport of a British citizen?

10. Before the British Embassy decided to destroy Mr Fletcher’s passport, were the pages within it photocopied? The dates of Mr. Fletcher’s travels in and out of both Thailand and Cambodia up to and including the dates of the alleged rapes is relevant to his legal position vis a vis the Phnom Penh Municipal court.

11. Given the seriousness of the charges laid against Mr Fletcher and the relevance of the dates of his travel in and out of both Cambodia and Thailand it is hard to imagine that copies of the pages of his passport were not made prior to its destruction. Will Mr Fletcher be provided with copies of these pages?

Ambassador Mark Kent did not acknowledge receipt of my letter but, after several letters to the Foreign Secretary, Mr Phillip Hammond, it was recommended that I make an application under Freedom of Information legislation to acquire answers to the above 11 questions asked of Mr Kent.

Three weeks later I received a letter, the most pertinent part of which reads:

Outcome of Search
I am writing to confirm that the FCO does have information relevant to your request. However, we are withholding this information for the reasons set out below.
Section 40 Personal Data
The withheld information is personal data relating to third parties. It is our view that disclosure of this information would breach the first data protection principle, which states that personal data should be processed fairly and lawfully. Section 40(2) and (3) of the Freedom of Information Act therefore apply. It is the fairness aspect of this principle which we believe would be breached by disclosure in this case. In such circumstances section 40 confers an absolute exemption on disclosure. We do not therefore have to apply the public interest test.
Yours sincerely,
Sue Bennett
Sue Bennett 
Deputy Head of Customer Interaction Team Consular Directorate.
I  wondered what possible good reason Sue Bennett could have for not answering any questions at all relating to Mr Fletcher’s ‘disappeared’ passport!
I dashed off a quick response:
Dear Sue Bennett

Your letter of 6th Oct is bureaucratic twaddle. I will respond  in due course to the nonsense you write but you may be interested to read the latest letter I have written to others who, like yourself, are committed to finding bureaucratic justification for their refusal to answer what is, in reality a very simple question: "What happened to Mr Fletcher's passport?" (see attached letter to Conor Doherty dated 2nd Oct) 

The more obfuscation you and your colleagues bring to this question the clearer becomes the answer to any sensible person - a decision has been made at quite a high level that Mr Fletcher's passport 'disappear' and that any and every effort must be made to guarantee that no-one ever knows why is disappeared or who was responsible for the decision that it should be 'accidentally destroyed'. If this means that Mr Fletcher is unable to present to the court evidence in his own defense, to be found in his passport or photocopies of pages from it, so be it!
Conor Doherty
Thailand, Burma, Laos and Cambodia Desk
Consular Directorate
Foreign & Commonwealth Office
King Charles Street
London SW1A 2AH                                                                          

2nd  October 2014

Dear Conor

Mr Vong Moneath, Mr Fletcher’s Khmer lawyer made enquiries similar to my own regarding his client’s passport. He received an automated reply which begins as follows:

Thank you for emailing Info.Bangkok@fco.gov.uk. This is an automated response. In order to resolve your query as quickly as possible, please check carefully whether the information you need can be found in any of the links below…etc

Clearly, the FCO is going to do everything it can to thwart Mr Fletcher’s lawyer, Mr Vong Moneath’s and my own attempts to find out precisely what happened to the missing passport. Given the lack of answers coming from the office of the Foreign Secretary, or from yourself, I must resort to conjecture.

I have a few theories  as to how Mr Fletcher’s passport was ‘accidentally destroyed’ but the following is the only one that accounts for all the known facts. This is a rather poor translation from court documents but there is no doubt about the gist of it:

“The SISHA Organization to Phnom Penh realized the information of departure of David John Fletcher for Thailand through Poipet, and also notified the UK Embassy to Thailand of the suspected history that this person can committed the sexual offense to the Cambodian children in Phnom Penh. After receipt of the information, the UK Embassy to Bangkok notified the Thai police of the offense in which David John Fletcher committed in Phnom Penh. In the evening on Sunday 27 June 2010, David John Fletcher was arrested by the Thai police at the guesthouse named SOM GUESTHOUSE…”

So, on the basis of information provided to it by SISHA the British Embassy in Thailand arranged for Mr Fletcher to be arrested by the Thai police upon his arrival in Thailand. At this point no arrest warrant for Mr Fletcher had been drawn up in Cambodia. At this point the only information that the British Embassy had at its disposal regarding Mr Fletcher’s alleged crimes was an article published by Andrew Drummond a week beforehand, on 20th June. And whatever it had been told by SISHA.

There is no mention in Mr Drummond’s article of the alleged rapes from the previous year and no suggestion from SISHA that any rape had occurred. Indeed, the woman Mr Fletcher is alleged to have raped, Yang Dany, is referred to in Mr Drummond’s article as his ‘fiance’ who Drummond quotes as saying the Mr Fletcher is a good man. 

The closest Mr Drummond’s article comes to accusing Mr Fletcher of a crime are the quotes he includes from Scott Neeson:

“…people like Fletcher are a continuous source of worry. There is little doubt Fletcher devotes his time to grooming young girls. The fact is these children can be bought. It’s difficult to stop it. The British Embassy have been told about Fletcher. Many organizations have files on him, but nothing has happened. If you can get this guy sent packing you are doing a service to the children here.”

So, the British Embassy had been told about Fletcher by Scott Neeson (and possibly others) and had tipped off the Thai police that he was about to enter Thailand – a week after Andrew Drummond’s article of 20th June 2010.

The word ‘flee’ has been used by many a journalist to describe what Mr Fletcher did when Mr Drummond’s article as published. In fact he stayed in Phnom Penh for six more days, giving many of his more precious possessions to Yang Dany and her mother Sekun. He did not flee. There was no warrant for Mr Fletcher’s arrest and he had not  been interviewed by the Anti Human Trafficking or any other police. Nor had he been interviewed by APLE or SISHA. Yang Dany had not told any of the NGOs mentioned in Mr Drummond’s article that she had been raped or mistreated by Nr Fletcher in any way. Indeed, Yang Dany referred to Mr Fletcher as a ‘good man’.

When the relevant paperwork was prepared by the Cambodian police and courts the dates given for the rapes were 15th March 2009 and 22nd March 2009. Someone at the British Embassy in Thailand (or perhaps more than one person)  looked at Mr Fletcher’s passport, realized that he was not in Cambodia at the time of the alleged rapes and panicked. Mr Fletcher could not possibly have committed the rapes on these dates if he was not in the country at the time. This was an embarrassing development, given the British Embassy’s complicity on arranging for Mr Fletcher’s arrest as soon as he arrived in Thailand on the basis of Mr Drummond’s sensationalist tabloid article.

So, a decision was made by someone (or more than one person) within the British Embassy to see to it that Mr Fletcher’s passport ‘disappeared’. This saved the British Embassy from some considerable embarrassment but, at the same time, necessitated the destruction of evidence that Mr Fletcher could use in court to prove his innocence.

This sounds like a plot line out of a John le Carre spy thriller but it is the only explanation that I have been able to come up with as to why Mr Fletcher’s passport disappeared under the circumstances that prevailed.

You could so easily, Conor, convince Mr Fletcher and myself (and the readers of my book) that the  conjecture I have just indulged in is just that – an unlikely plot line from a John Le Carre-style novel.  All that is required is that you provide a logical explanation for the disappearance of Mr Fletcher’s passport.

Your website makes it quite clear that the British Embassy does not interfere with the internal workings of its host government. In reality, the British Embassy did interfere when, on the basis of a demonstrably factually incorrect article by a hack journalist, it arranged for Mr Fletcher’s arrest in Thailand.

You must now ‘interfere’ again by providing the Phnom Penh Municipal Court with Mr Fletcher’s passport or, if it has been destroyed, with a letter to the court explaining that Mr Fletcher is unable to prove that he was not in Cambodia at the time of the alleged rapes because the British Embassy dog ate it or whatever explanation you can come up with to explain the passport’s non-existence today.

best wishes

James Ricketson

Mr Conor Doherty has not acknowledged receipt of this letter.

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