Monday, December 15, 2014

# 69 Foreign & Commonwealth Office play childish games to refuse David Fletcher documents he needs to prove his innocence of the charge of rape.

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

Mr Phillip Hammond
Foreign Secretary
Parliamentary House of Commons
London SW1A                                                                                   

15th   Dec. 2014

Dear Foreign Secretary

Mr David Fletcher’s many requests that I be accorded his power of attorney have been ignored by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. I have attached his original letter, signed and hand-written by Mr Fletcher on 10th Sept 2014. It reads:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

“I, David John Fletcher, aged 70, UK citizen, hereby give Mr James Ricketson my full permission to request any information relating to myself and given copies of such information he requests. That instruction includes my lawyer, Mr Moneath, Cambodian police and Immigration. I would appreciate it if you would assist him as much as possible. Thanking your for your cooperation.”

At the time he wrote this, Mr Fletcher was unable to send documents of any kind out of jail or receive them without paying a prison guard to smuggle them in or out. Given that he needed a variety of different documents to prepare for his forthcoming court case it made a lot of practical sense for someone such as myself to assist him – particularly since the British Embassy in Cambodia was doing nothing to assist him.

In Sept. 2014 I had no idea if Mr Fletcher might be guilty or innocent of the rape of Yang Dany. This was before I had acquired a copy of the court document in which the examining doctor declared Yang Dany’s hymen to be intact after two ‘brutal rapes’; before I had met Yang Dany and her mother and had been informed by them that no rapes had taken place. At the time I offered to assist Mr Fletcher, three months ago, he was merely a man who, I believed, was entitled to the presumption of innocence. If I could help him have his day in court (as is his right) I would do so. His guilt or innocence was not in the forefront of my thinking. It was the fundamental principles of justice that I had in mind.

On 6th Oct 2014 Sue Bennett, Deputy Head of Customer Interaction Team Consular Directorate acknowledged my right to request information on Mr Fletcher’s behalf but explained, with the following words, why she would not be providing me with any information.
“Your request largely covers the same ground as an ongoing Subject Access Request (SAR) that we are handling on behalf of the subject in addition to his formal complaint of which you are aware. Under section 14(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request for information if it is a repeated request for identical or substantially similar information. You have provided consent from the subject for us to release information to you on his behalf. However even if we were to validate this by obtaining the subjects direct consent we may still refuse to comply with your request on the grounds that any such information would be released to him under his SAR, which we are considering under the Data Protection Act 1998.”
Whilst Ms Bennett tacitly acknowledges my power of attorney, she rejects my request for information on the grounds that Mr Fletcher had also requested the same information. I could understand the logic of this if Mr Bennett did, in fact, intend to release documents to Mr Fletcher. However, as of 15th Dec 2014, Sue Bennett has not delivered one document to Mr Fletcher. She is going out of her way to obstruct Mr Fletcher’s request for Data Protection documents, whilst Joanna Roper is now informing him that the FCO will not recognize my power of attorney – regardless, it seems, of any legal document Mr Fletcher may provide to this effect.

Mr Fletcher told me, on my first visit to him in jail, that the FCO was not only obstructing his attempts to be given a fair trial in Cambodia but had been actively involved in having him arrested in Thailand (June 2010) and destroying his passport – containing as it did evidence that he was not in Cambodia at the time of the alleged rapes in March 2009. I took these allegations of Mr Flether’s with a huge grain of salt, believing it to be paranoia on his part. British Embassies are there to help citizens of the UK, I thought to myself, not to be complicit in having them jailed!

Whilst I dismissed Mr Fletcher’s conspiracy theory I believed that paranoid prisoners are entitled to a fair trial. As a documentary filmmaker for whom the asking of questions is an integral part of my job, I could not dismiss Mr Fletcher’s allegations about the FCO as paranoia, however, without looking a little more closely at them.

It did not take me long to locate the doctor’s report from Sept 2010 that makes it clear that Mr Fletcher could not have raped Yang Dany unless, as the judges in the Phnom Penh Municipal Court claimed in their judgment, a woman’s hymen can grow back.

This document set me off on a voyage if discovery that continues to this day. I need not repeat what I have discovered. I want only to deal, here, with Mr Fletcher’s request that I be provided with assistance from the FCO in helping him have his day in court. Mr Fletcher has made this request abundantly clear with his written permission and in numerous emails. And the Foreign & Commonwealth Office has made it equally clear that it has no intention of acceding to Mr Fletchers wishes.

On numerous occasions now I have written you a letter, sent electronically,  only to find, within a day (sometimes within an hour) that someone within the FCO has sent an email to Mr Fletcher with a bureaucratic spin answer to a question (or questions) I have asked you. You are clearly aware of Mr Fletcher’s case and have clearly instructed your staff to do all they can to thwart Mr Fletcher in his quest for a fair trial in Cambodia. Knowing as you do that Cambodia is amongst the most corrupt countries in the world you are not only abandoning Mr Fletcher to a judiciary that does not even play lip service to the Cambodian Code of Criminal Procedure but sending a not-so-subtle message to the Cambodian government: “You can do as you please when it comes to the pursuit, persecution and prosecution of British men acused of sex offences. I will make no request that these British citizens receive a fair trial. I will send no British Embassy observors to court. I will not demand that the Cambodian Code of Criminal Procedure be adhered to or that the accused be allowed to call witnesses, present a defense or be accorded any of the other rights to be found in the Cambodian Code of Criminal Procedure. Even in the case of the most egregious and blatantly obvious miscarriage of justice I will say nothing.

There is no polite way to say this, Mr Hammond: Your silence, your turning of a blind eye, your abandonment of British citizens constitutes a level of moral bankruptsy that I find both shocking and bewildering.

Here, below, is an example of the form of obstruction you have instructed FCO staff to engage in. Sue Bennett sent Mr Fletcher an email with a letter attached. The letter was empty. This was pointed out to Sue Bennett by both Mr Fletcher and myself. We both suggested to Ms Bennett that she might like to cut and paste the contents of the letter and send it through to Mr Fletcher. Ms Bennett’s response (referring to herself as the ‘Feedback Team’) was as follows:

Dear Mr Fletcher,

As you are not able to open the letter that we have sent to you twice we have decided to not send again in any format but to hand you a hard copy with the papers which are with our colleagues in Phnom Penh. We have them asked to arrange a Prison Visit for as soon as possible next week. In the meantime we are working on the final set of papers which we aim to get to you early in the New Year.

Regards,

Feedback Team

This is nonsense. An empty attachment is an empty attachment. I have forwarded the attached document to yourself and you know, if you tried to open it, that there is nothing inside. Ms Bennett, acting on instructions, is clearly intent on making it as difficult as possible (if not impossible) for Mr Fletcher (or myself) to be appraised of the reason why the FCO has decided to ignore (on legal advice!) his request that I be proved with his power of attorney.

Ms Bennett last promised that Mr Fletcher would receive the first tranche of documents by 10th Dec. As of 15th Dec. Fletcher has still not received the documents that he requested the FCO send to me in Australia; has not received the covering letter from Joanna Roper in which she explains why the FCO refuses to accept my power of attorney.

My suspicion is that Mr Fletcher will not receive the first tranche of documents this week and that some new excuse will be found for their non-delivery. And then, of course, Christmas will be upon us, providing the British Embassy in Cambodia with a whole array of logical sounding reasons as to why documents cannot be delivered – shortage of staff owing to holidays and so on. And for as long as this new bout of obstruction continues neither Mr Fletcher or myself will know on what legal basis the FCO has decided to refuse to grant me power of attorney – which is clearly Mr Fletcher’s wish.

But let’s just presume that Mr Fletcher does receive the first tranche of documents this week, along with the covering letter. Presuming that these are not immediately stolen from him by prison guards and presuming that he retains sporadic access to a $20 mobile phone, Mr Fletcher will then have to transcribe, one letter at a time, the contents of both these documents (of which, presumably, there will be many) and the letter explaining why it is that you, Mr Hammond, refuse to grant me Mr Fletcher’s power of attorney.

Given that Mr Fletcher’s cell was raided by prison officers in the week preceding his trial and all his money stolen, it will or surprise me at all if the same happens with the documents Sue Bennett provides to Mr Fletcher. If this were to occur Sue Bennett would no doubt be able to find some clause in the relevant Data Protection Act to the effect that stolen documents cannot be replaced!

The desire on the part of the FCO to obstruct Mr Fletcher in his quest for a fair trial will be nakedly obvious by now to all those who are following my blog today. It will also be nakedly obvious to all present when Mr Fletcher’s case is heard in a properly constituted court of law in the United Kingdom. Even the most skeptical observer will wonder why the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary put so much effort into obstructing the course of justice in Cambodia. “Shouldn’t he be doing everything in his power to facilitate a fair trial for Mr Fletcher?” a reader of my blog today might ask. “Shouldn’t Mr Hammond be delighted that Mr Ricketson is offering to assist Mr Fletcher in his quest for a fair trial and co-operate with him in every way possible?”

No doubt this letter will result in a response sent to Mr Fletcher in which Sue Bennett, describing herself as the ‘feedback team’ will set forth the new set of reasons as to why Mr Fletcher cannot be provided with the documents that are his right to be in possession of in accordance with Data Protection.

best wishes


James Ricketson

No comments:

Post a Comment