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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