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
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