Thursday, December 11, 2014

# 64 The paper trail continues! Letter # 29 to Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond

James Ricketson
316 Whale Beach Road
Palm Beach 2108
Sydney, Australia

Mr Phillip Hammond
Foreign Secretary
Parliamentary House of Commons
London SW1A                                                                                   

11th    Dec. 2014

Dear Mr Hammond

Within half an hour of my emailing you my 28th letter, dated 10th Dec, Mr Fletcher received the email you can read here. The letter supposedly attached to this email, from Joanna Roper cannot be opened because, as you will discover when you try, it is empty!

Dear Mr Fletcher,

Please find the attached release letter from Joanna Roper, Director Consular Services in respect of your subject access request (Batch 1 Cambodia).

The documentation has been released to consular officials at our Embassy in Phnom Penh. They will be in touch to arrange a prison visit and will personally hand the papers to you under cover of this letter; in addition they will explain the decision we have taken not to comply with your power of attorney request following legal advice.  

If you need further advice on this or your ongoing complaint please contact us using our mailbox.

Regards,
FOI/DPA Team
Consular Directorat

Presumably Joanna Roper’s letter, if such a letter exists, explains on what legal basis the Foreign & Commonweath Office has refused Mr Fletcher's written request that I be granted his power of attorney. Could you please explain the reasoning behind this decision and direct me to that part of the law which grants the FCO (or any other body) the right to refuse a power of attorney request such as the one Mr Fletcher has made?

You will not, of course, respond in any way to these questions because I do not have Mr Fletcher's power of attorney. This is beyond Orwell and Kafka, indeed beyond both Monty Python and Alice in Wonderland. We have entered strange new and uncharted territory here which points to the death of democracy as we know it in the United Kingdom. You and your staff are laws unto yourselves and will abrogate whatever law you need in order to keep a man in jail whom you know to be innocent – unless, that is you agree with the judges in the Phnom Penh Municipal Court that a woman’s hymen can grow back.

You need Mr Fletcher in jail, Foreign Minister. Indeed, it would be convenient for you if he were dead because he represents a huge threat to you alive. Back in the United Kingdom Mr Fletcher can (and will) sue the FCO for its complicity in his arrest, his incarceration and now in doing all it can to prevent him from acquiring the documents he needs to prove his innocence.

Since publishing my last letter to you on my blog today I have received the following – just one of many such testimonies that point to corruption within CEOPS, within APLE and within the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. I have redacted only the names and one paragraph of what was written to me. And the reason for this is that the writer fears for the safety of certain people back in Cambodia whose lives could well be at risk if their identities were known. You must appreciate, Mr Hammond, that the APLE scam nets the NGO millions of dollars a year and that some part of these monies must be paid to a variety of Cambodian officials to keep the scam operational. Without pedophiles the APLE business model would collapse. The supply must be kept up:

Hi James

You are exactly right in everything you say to David. If he gives up and dies he will be playing right into their hands. They will have won in every way.
  
I went through the same things that happened to David but I was lucky to get out after only 1 year. I am more than happy to add my evidence to his. I am sure that as soon as some of us present evidence together it won’t be long before the floodgates will open and the British government will be forced to act or just dig themselves into a deeper hole. Also I’m in the UK so I’m very happy to go to Westminster and the Foreign Office in person to fight.

I started off thinking I would only need to raise the same issues you are raising and some rogue individuals would face justice. How wrong was I. I now understand that the treatment I received was sanctioned and supported right the way to the top in both Cambodia and the UK. It is like dealing with a mafia. There will be political opponents who will be looking for this type of ammunition.

Like you I also found it very difficult getting documentation. Whilst I was in Cambodia (prison and the 2 hour ‘trial’) I was never once given any paperwork, I had only 10 minutes’ notice that I was going to court, no documents, no disclosure not even a lawyer! I was told the sentence and verdict before entering the court room. I wasn’t allowed to call witnesses or cross examine. I wasn’t even charged prior to detention. When I got to the courthouse I had no idea what I was supposed to have done!

When I got back to the UK I first did what’s called a subject access request under the data protection act to CEOP as they are required by law to supply my personal data which they hold within 40 days. It took over 7 months and repeated complaints to the data commissioner’s office to get anything out of them! During this period they had plenty of time to heavily filter it. They refused to release copies of documents but instead took odd comments and sentences and typed them up in a random table without dates making it impossible to put any time line to it or to decipher if things were from e-mails, documents or text messages. Unbelievably this is acceptable under British law.

There were however some notable CEOP comments such as:

‘ xxxx and yyyy are likely to be released unconditionally anytime in the next 30 minutes as the prosecutor cities insufficient evidence to justify continued detention’.

Bear in mind that the above statement comes after APLE & CEOP had been following me for 3 years (I have proof) and 60 children from my two orphanages had been interviewed by the Cambodian National Police and their statements checked by my lawyer. The Children say there is nothing, the Cambodian National Police say there is nothing, my staff say there is nothing, my lawyer says there is nothing and the court prosecutor says there is nothing!

I have recently received case notes from the British Embassy which record that the Embassy was contacted by an independent foreign observer who attended the trial. He was concerned that I did not receive a fair trial and reported that the court had said that as my case was not a criminal case but only a misdemeanour, there was no need to provide a lawyer for me. The observer spoke with a member of the court staff who told him that it was not good that I did not have a lawyer and that none of the six children who gave evidence at the court made any accusation and they appeared to be attending under coercion. The British Embassy did not attend even though they knew in advance the trial was taking place.

One witness had been called on my behalf and she surprised the court when she stated that the day before the trial she had been visited by two people who offered her $5000 if she would change her statement and say I had abused her children. She refused to lie. The judge asked if these people were in court. She said yes and pointed to them. One was the Action Pour Les Enfant lawyer and the other identified herself as a ‘social worker’ employed by Action Pour Les Enfant. The judge asked the social worker if it was true and if so why she did it, she replied that it was and she did it because her boss told her to.

The British Embassy wrote to me shortly before my release from the prison saying:

“We received formal notification from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday 12th September 2011 that the ministry of interior has ordered that you should be deported from Cambodia when released from prison at the end of your one year term in prison. This was the first the Embassy knew of a deportation order having been issued against you.

Given there was no instruction from the court in your verdict for deportation we have formally asked the ministry of Foreign Affairs to explain the reason for your deportation. However they are not obliged to tell us the reason if they do not wish to……..”

Further CEOP comments:

‘ … the charity (name redacted) fund is growing by the day and the sooner xxxx can  remove yyyy from his position the better’.

Talking about the Sunday newspapers

‘Can we push YYYY on the Sunday’s please, ideal for NOTW (News of the World), Mirror and People’.

This is an objective police investigation??? Says it all doesn’t it.

This is an excerpt from something I wrote which illustrates the openness of CEOP to bribing local police and perverting the course of justice:

“On the morning of my release I was told to leave the prison and as I went outside found 9 policemen waiting for me with the representative of CEOP. I was not given any paperwork. When I asked they said they would give it to me later – they never did. I then discovered why 9 policemen had turned up as we stopped just outside Siem Reap and the CEOP representative paid for an expensive breakfast and drinks for everyone. Having received their ‘thank you’ 7 of the policemen then went off into Siem Reap. On the rest of the journey the CEOP representative produced cash to pay for the vehicle fuel and for lunch. They took me to Phnom Penh immigration detention centre where I was held in solitary confinement for 5 days for 24hrs a day and was not allowed out for exercise. Because I was not being extradited/deported and I was not under arrest it was  my choice which country I went to from Cambodia and I decided the best thing to do was to return to England where I could try to get justice.

My family paid for a flight ticket for me and the British Embassy delivered it to the detention centre. I was then released and flew back to England via Bangkok. It was my choice, I was not under arrest and I travelled on my own.”

I hope this gives you a bit of the flavour of what happened to me and how relevant it is to David’s circumstances.


I have no reason to disbelieve anything this correspondent writes but my trust in its veracity is neither here nor there. What is required is an independent investigation into these (and a mass of other) allegations of corruption within CEOPS, APLE and the British Embassies of Cambodia and Thailand. The extent to which you and your staff are going to thwart Mr Fletcher’s attempts to obtain documents he is entitled to under FOI legislation, and to give me his power of attorney, make it clear that such an investigation cannot be made by your own ministry.

It is interesting to note this correspondent’s observation about the use of the ‘Sundays’ (tabloid press) to defame those whom APLE and CEOPS have chosen as their latest victims to feed the APLE business model. Is APLE also paying CEOPS staff to do its public relations work for it? This is not a rhetorical question. It is question that needs to be asked by someone or some body with broad powers of investigation and who cannot be instructed by yourself to be as obstructive as possible.

best wishes


James Ricketson

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