# 100 A message for Scott Neeson: "RETURN CCF'S 700 'ORPHANS' TO THEIR FAMILIES!"

The following is an extract from a Friends International campaign to help close down the orphanage business worldwide. Cambodia is awash with ‘orphans’ who have families!

See:

http://www.thinkchildsafe.org/thinkbeforedonating/

THE REAL PICTURE

“The mother had been searching for him for years. She thought he was dead. When we arrived in town his mother was working in the fields (on the other side of the river). When she saw him from the boat as she came home, she jumped out of the boat to swim to her kid. She cried, and fainted. When she finally woke up again, she and her son cried and hugged. That was six years ago. Now he lives at home, he has graduated from high-school, and works in a metal shop.” – Social worker comments on emotional bonds between parent and child (who had been placed in residential care)*

An emotional reunion between parent and child is shown in the example above. However, reintegration is not easy. The longer a child is institutionalized the harder it is for them to settle back into family life and normal society.

Scott Neeson, do you have even one orphan amongst the 700 kids that you have living in Cambodian Children’s Fund?

“At the shelter I only had to eat, sleep and study. Now I shop and cook, and take care of my sisters and brothers. It’s more work but I prefer living with my family. At first I was afraid of the market, but now I am not afraid anymore.” – Reintegrated child*

How many of CCF’s 700 kids in residential care have at least one parent?

It is essential that early mechanisms to support reintegrated children and their families are in place to smooth the transition and ensure the family can stay together. Reintegration is a holistic, multi-layered process and it is not always helpful to isolate one factor alone, since successful reintegration relies on several factors working together. These factors can include school support and income generation in the family. There are often multiple challenges to face, however a refocusing of donor priorities from care institutions onto support for organizations working in the field with families will see these challenges being effectively addressed. In practical terms, the cost of supporting residential care is much higher than supporting a family to care for their child. Donor impact dollar for dollar can be much greater if focused on family support solutions, and can also be more positive as it reflects national and international legislation and priorities which promote family-centered non-residential care alternatives.

How many of the 700 kids sleeping 3 and 4 to a bed in CCF dormitories that have no living biological parents also have no uncles, aunts, grandmas, grandpas or cousins who could take care of them?

If you donate to support institutionalized care your good intentions may actually be causing harm to children, keeping them from their family and hampering their development. Most children in institutions do not need to be there. Many institutions are woefully inadequate in providing a duty of care or protection to children. In fact many are run as profit making businesses, pure and simple. The commodity they trade in? Children. The money they source to keep business booming? Yours.

The Cambodian Children’s Fund claims, in its 2013 tax return, to be spending roughly $4,000 per year to house and educate one child! Imagine if even half this amount were to be given to the child’s extended family, to the village, to the community? This would make it possible for pretty well each and every child in CCF residential care to be living with his or her family.

Imagine if the other $2,000 were to be given to the village/community to employ an extra teacher for the local school? Or to enable the village/community to start up its own micro-financing scheme to help prevent extremely poor families from selling their homes and land when they run up debts they can’t repay?

As you know, most of the families that wind up working in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump are there because they have lost land and homes to money lenders – from whom they borrowed money (at exorbitant interest rates) they could not repay. Very often this money was loaned to pay medical expenses when a member of the family became very ill.

Imagine if, instead of spending $4,000 a year on one child, CCF were to invest $4,000 a year in the village or community from which they child came – on microfinance, health and education. That’s 700 villages each year. That would be quite some achievement!

As you know, as has been known for a long time, the creation of 700 orphans is not the way to go. You need a new model, Scott.  

The creative and really useful ways that CCF could use the money it raises to strengthen families and communities are endless.

# 99 UK Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond's Foreign & Commonwealth Office caught out lying about David Fletcher's passport.

Phillip Hammond

Foreign Secretary

Parliamentary House of Commons

London

SW1A                                                                                                   

19^th Feb 2015

Dear Mr Hammond

re David Fletcher’s passport

This is my 35^th letter to you regarding the mysterious destruction of Mr David Fletcher’s passport by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

To date you have not acknowledged receipt of one of my letters but, instead, have left it to a growing list of spin doctors to find new ways not to answer questions or, in the case of Ross Allen, to refuse to communicate with me at all. This refusal to communicate with me extended, until a 8 days ago, to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.

In the event it is proven that Mr Fletcher’s passport, containing evidence of his innocence of the charge of rape, was deliberately destroyed by senior consular officials at the UK Thai Embassy, you are now complicit in the cover-up that has taken place to conceal the truth.

Here is the content of the email sent to me by Dilvinder Sander Caseworker for the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman on 11th Feb.

Dear Mr Ricketson

Thank you for your email and letter. We have now placed Mr Fletcher’s consent on file and attached you as a representative for his complaint.

From the correspondence you and Mr Fletcher have sent to us we can see that he is generally unhappy with the actions of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (the FCO). However, for us to be able to investigate a complaint it is important that we fully understand the issues complained about and the impact of these issues on the complainant.  We also need to be clear what the complainant would like to achieve through bringing his complaint to us.

At present, although I understand that Mr Fletcher is unhappy with the level of support provided to him by the FCO, it is unclear what his specific complaint is.  We do appreciate that it is difficult for Mr Fletcher to correspond with us directly.  However, we are unable to take the complaint forward without this information.

We note in your letter to us that a formal complaint may be some months off.  I should explain that we would not ordinarily keep a case open for this length of time if we are unable to progress it. Therefore, it may be more sensible at this stage for us to close the case to allow you and Mr Fletcher the time to compile the information you need to make the complaint.  In that event, you would be free to return to us at a later date and we would be able to consider Mr Fletcher’s case again.  I should also add that we will retain on file the information you have already provided, so you would not need to send this again.

Alternatively, if you wish to proceed with the complaint at this stage, we will need some further information from you.  In particular, I would be grateful if you could clarify the following:

-      What is Mr Fletcher’s complaint about the FCO?  It would be helpful if you could be as specific as possible;

-      How Mr Fletcher has been personally affected by the events he is complaining about; and

-      What outcomes he would like us to achieve on his behalf.

Please provide this information to us by 11 March 2015. If you are unable to provide us with the information by this date we will close the complaint.

If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely

Dilvinder Sander

Poor Dilvinder! S/he has been given the job of creating the illusion that the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman operates independently of the FCO. At arms length. Clearly this is not the case. My response to Dilvinder speaks for itself.

Dilvinder Sander

Caseworker

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

Millbank Tower

Millbank

London

SW1P 4QP

Dear Dilvinda Sander

Whilst I appreciate that you are, some four months down the track, prepared to accept that I can act on Mr Fletcher's behalf, I wonder if this actually means that you acknowledge the power of attorney that he has vested in me?

If so, could you please ask the FCO to deliver to me, in Phnom Penh, the 2nd tranche of documents promised to Mr Fletcher. These were to be delivered to him in Jan this year. They have not been.

I have attached a letter written a little over a week ago in which Mr Fletcher asks for them, yet again. I would like to pick these documents up from the British Embassy in Phnom Penh in the next two days.

I will refrain from responding to the content of your email until I see if, in fact (and not just in theory) I am able to act on Mr Fletcher's behalf and pick up the second tranche of documents.

I will say at this point, however, that I have no confidence at all in the FCO's desire to assist Mr Fletcher in any way. Indeed all the evidence suggests that the FCO, from Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond down, is prepared to do all it can to thwart Mr Fletcher's desire (and his right) to a fair trial.

I have, as I mentioned a week or so ago, appealed directly to the Minister for Justice in Cambodia. See attached letter.

I have pasted below an English language translation of this letter.

I will, in the next 48 hours, as a result of new developments, be writing again to the Minister for Justice.

best wishes

James Ricketson

Dilvinder Sander did not, needless to say, respond to this email. Nor was the 2^nd tranche of promised documents forthcoming. So, on 16^th Feb I wrote again:

Dear Dilvinda

Whilst the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman now accepts me as Mr Fletcher’s representative, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office does not. The FCO refuses to communicate with me in anyway despite Mr Fletcher having granted me his power of attorney.

You already know this as I have copied in excess of 30 letters to Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond to your office. It is more than a little disingenuous of yourself, on behalf of the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman, to pretend that it does not know the nature of Mr Fletcher’s complaint.  Indeed, as of Dec 2014 the office of the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman refused to communicate with me either. (see below).

The following is not by any means an exhaustive list of Mr Fletcher’s complaints about the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but it will suffice for the time being:

(1) The FCO has provided 3 different and contradictory versions of how it came to be that Mr Fletcher’s passport was destroyed. When asked to reconcile these three different versions the FCO refused to communicate with either myself or Mr Fletcher any further.

(2) On 10^th Dec 2014 Joanna Roper, Director Consular Services, informed Mr Fletcher that he would be given a letter which “will explain the decision we have taken not to comply with your power of attorney request following legal advice.”

The letter in question, written by Acting Director of Consular Services Ross Allen, explains nothing at all. The relevant part of it reads:

“In your email of 1 December you asked for confirmation that we would accept your Power of Attorney (POA) instruction and communicate directly through your friend, James Ricketson, on all matters relating to your subject access request and complaint. We have sought legal advice about this and I regret that we are not duty bound to comply with this request for the following reasons:

The POA does not compel us to deal with a third party in such circumstances when there is a clear ability to deal directly with the requestor.

…As you know we advised Mr Ricketson on 7th Nov  that we will not reply to any of his emails or speak with him personally either on the telephone or in person.”

In light of what I have learnt from documents that have been provided to Mr Fletcher it is unsurprising that Ross Allen issued such a fatwa - decreeing that no communication with me would take place. In this way he can offer a lame ‘Yes Prime Minister’ bureaucrat’s justification for not responding to me when I point out that he has been (I am trying to be polite here) ‘parsimonious with the truth’ as regards the fate of Mr Fletcher’s passport.

Here is Mr Allen’s account of when and how Mr Fletcher’s passport came into the possession of the British Embassy in Thailand in July 2012:

“When a British passport is found and handed into an Embassy, the policy of Her Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO) is that the passport will not be returned to the holder because we do not know who has had possession of the passport in the intervening period. During this time the passport may have been tampered with, cloned or otherwise compromised and therefore have become a security risk. Mr Fletcher’s passport was received at the British Embassy with no accompanying explanation. I am therefore satisfied that consular staff acted appropriately in cancelling the passport and returning it to HMPO.”

How can this assertion of Ross Allen’s be reconciled with FCO documents that make it quite clear that Mr Fletcher’s passport was in the British Embassy’s possession on 28^th July 2010 and 23^rd may 2011. Two extracts:

28^th July 2010

“Will take a/n’s passport to the IDC  tomorrow so that he can draw his money from the Western Union. Once we get hold on that amount the deportation will be in place. I am trying to find out about the flight cost and its availability and it is likely to be early next week.”

23^rd May 2011

“I told Mr Fletcher that we were now holding his passport…”

The only way that Ross Allen’s account could be true is if, some time after 23^rd May 2011, Mr Fletcher’s passport left the British Embassy in Thailand, was somehow lost, then “found and handed into” the embassy “with no accompanying explanation” a little over a year later! For this scenario to be credible, the following questions must be asked:

- Why, at some point after 23^rd May 2011, did Mr Fletcher’s passport leave the embassy?

- Where was the passport sent? To whom?

When Mr Fletcher’s passport was “found and handed into” the British Embassy it was known to embassy staff that Mr Fletcher was in a Thai prison, that he was fighting an extradition order from Cambodia and that his passport contained evidence that he was not in Cambodia at the time of the alleged rapes – March 2009. This leads to the question:

- Who issued the order that Mr Fletcher’s passport be cancelled and then destroyed?

I doubt very much that the cancellation and destruction of a passport happens without someone quite senior within the embassy signing off on the process. Who was this person?

I suspect that the destruction of a passport would not happen without the knowledge of the Ambassador to Thailand. Is this so? If so, Ambassador Mark Kent knowingly destroyed evidence that Mr Fletcher required for his defense in court in Cambodia.

Justice demands that precisely what happened to Mr Fletcher’s passport be investigated by a body independent of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I am not familiar enough with the British legal system to know what body should conduct such an investigation but I would have thought, at the very least, that the matter should be referred to the police – the destruction of evidence required by Mr Fletcher in his legal defense.

That the Foreign & Commonwealth Office should refuse to allow me to assist Mr Fletcher in his quest for a fair trial is, at the very least, petty and vindictive. Why should the FCO put so much effort into obstructing the course of justice?

The same applies with the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Parliamentary Health and Services Ombudsman – both of which should, in theory, function independently from the FCO and be committed to seeing to it that Mr Flether’s legal and human rights are protected. Not so. In relation to the FCO’s refusal to communicate with me, the covering letter also states:

“The Information Commissioner’s Office and the Parliamentary Health and Services Ombudsman support our approach.”

So, as of Dec. 2014 the Parliamentary Health and Services Ombudsman refused to communicate with the person Mr Fletcher has asked them to communicate with! Myself (Both ‘Monty Python’ and ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ spring to mind.)

The Parliamentary Health and Services Ombudsman which, in theory, provides oversight for the FCO was, in Dec 2014, working hand in glove with the FCO to thwart Mr Fletcher’s attempts, with my assistance, to be provided with the fair trial he has been denied for close to five years now!

In Feb 2015 the Parliamentary Health and Services Ombudsman, via yourself, Davinda, has decided that it will communicate with me after all! What has caused the Parliamentary Health and Services Ombudsman to change its mind? Or, more pertinently, what does the Parliamentary Health and Services Ombudsman make of the fact that Ross Allen’s fatwa is still in place; that the FCO refuses to communicate with me or allow me to exercise the rights that accrued to me when Mr Fletcher granted me his power of attorney? And why are you pretending, Davinda, that you do not know the nature of Mr Fletcher’s complaints when you have a thick folder in front of you which contains, in forensic detail, the nature of Mr Fletcher’s complaints?

My experience with bureaucracies (which is considerable) is that the tactic now being employed by the FCO (working hand-in-glove with the Parliamentary Health and Services Ombudsman) is to accept a complaint from myself so that you can write a letter to Mr Fletcher filled with spin doctor bureaucratese of the ‘Yes Prime Minister’ variety which says, in essence, “Having carefully considered your complaint we find that the Foreign & and Commonwealth Office has not been in breach of any of its obligations…” etc.

Please, Davinda, your office has already made it clear that you work in conjunction with the very body (the FCO) that you are supposed to investigate impartially. I was not born yesterday!

If the Parliamentary Health and Services Ombudsman wishes to actually do something to assist Mr Fletcher, please do so but please do not write back to either Mr Fletcher or myself with a response that is nothing other than spin designed to obscure the fact that Ross Allen has lied about the fate of Mr Fletcher’s passport.

If Ross Allen cannot provide a plausible explanation for the whereabouts of Mr Fletcher’s passport between 23^rd May 2011 and July 2012 he has, at the very least, been complicit in perverting the course of justice in Cambodia and is not fit to occupy the position he does.

Given that you do work hand-in-glove with the FCO could you please ask Ross Allen and Joanna Roper why they refuse to (a) Accept my power of attorney and (b) why the FCO refuses to provide Mr Fletcher with the second tranche of documents that he was told would be delivered to him in January?

Addressing two of your questions specifically You ask:

How Mr Fletcher has been personally affected by the events he is complaining about?

Mr Fletcher is serving a 10 year jail sentence for a crime he could not have committed if he was not in Cambodia at the time of the alleged offences. Evidence that he was not in Cambodia was contained in Mr Fletcher’s passport – cancelled and destroyed by the FCO under circumstances that leave many questions unanswered. Mr Fletcher wants answers and is entitled to them. I/we find it hard to believe, under the circumstances, that Mr Fletcher’s passport would have been destroyed without copies of the relevant pages of his passport having been photocopied.

You ask also:

What outcomes he would like us to achieve on his behalf?

Mr Fletcher wishes (a) to know why the FCO refuses to accept my as his representative in accordance with the power of attorney he has vested in me, (b) that the FCO make good its promise to provide Mr Fletcher with the documents he was told would be delivered to him in Jan 2015 and (c) be provided with answers to all the outstanding questions relating to the fate of his passport at the hands of the FCO. The FCO should decide upon one story (rather than three) and stick to it and, of course, provide all the documents required to support this version of events.

Please, when you respond to this letter, Dilvinda, no spin! Simply answer my questions in a straight-forward manner and respond to my observations accordingly.

The FCO has made it abundantly clear that it has no intention of assisting Mr Fletcher in any way so I am now focusing my attention on the Minister for Justice in Cambodia (see attached letter) in the hopes that he may not only agree to allow Mr Fletcher a fair trial but also look  into the activities of those NGOs that feed off the poverty of the Cambodian people to fill their coffers with sponsor and donor dollars.

best wishes

Clearly, Mr Hammond, you have no intention of instructing any members of your staff to answer pertinent questions relating to the fate of Mr Fletcher’s passport. You have clearly instructed them to be as obstructive as possible and thwart Mr Fletcher’s quest for a fair trial. This includes the FCO’s refusal to supply Mr Fletcher with the 2^nd tranche of documents that he was told would be delivered to him In Jan.

This is your prerogative as Foreign Secretary, though to treat a UK citizen with such contempt is morally reprehensible.

You will appreciate that it is my responsibility, as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, to persist with my enquiries until I obtain answers that are credible. To date all Mr Fletcher or myself have been provided with is spin, obfuscation and, in the case of Ross Allen, “We’re not going to communicate with you because you used the f word to a sensitive member of our staff to whom we owe a duty of care!”

And the FCO’s duty of care the Mr Fletcher? Zero! “Let him rot in jail. No trial? Who cares!”

Please, Mr Hammond, were it not for the grave consequences for Mr Fletcher of the destruction of his passport – close to 5 years in jail with no trial - this matter has all the hallmarks of classic ‘Yes Prime Minister’ farce.

best wishes

James Ricketson