Seven men on trial for alleged sex attacks on tiny Pitcairn island — home to descendants of the Bounty mutineers — might have to wait until next year to learn if convictions would result in prison time, British officials said on Tuesday.
Britain’s High Commission in Wellington is responsible for governing the territory, a tiny speck of rock midway between New Zealand and South America, settled by mutineers from the British warship HMS Bounty in 1790.
Before any convicted men are sent to prison, the remote island’s newly established Supreme Court must first rule on whether English law applies to the defendants, who include the island’s mayor.
The three-judge team hearing the trials on the island ruled on Monday that the Supreme Court would consider the legal issues at a hearing in New Zealand early in 2005. No date was set.
”Sentences will be conveyed, if any convictions are made, to the defendants but will not be entered [imposed] until the hearing on the applicability of English law on Pitcairn” is held and ruled on, British High Commission spokesperson in New Zealand, Bryan Nicolson, said on Tuesday.
He expected the sentences to be handed down, but not imposed, once the trials had been completed, likely in the next two weeks.
Two of the seven defendants already have pleaded guilty to sex charges.
Last week, lawyers defending the seven men were granted the right to appeal the trial process and challenge whether British law applies to the remote island before a British appellate court.
Britain’s Privy Council will consider the ”jurisdiction and composition of the court and trial and the applicability of the British statutes under which they’re being prosecuted,” said Privy Council registrar John Watherston. That ruling is expected to come after the Pitcairn Supreme Court rules
on the same question.
The Privy Council is the highest appeal court for many British colonies and former colonies.
The delay in imposing sentences on guilty defendants has also disrupted British plans to dispatch a group of six prison warders to staff the island’s newly built prison.
Nicolson said the warders had been due to leave New Zealand for the island next week, but now will not leave until after the Supreme Court hearing ”clarifies the situation” in the new year.
The cases against several defendants, including the island’s mayor, have been heard over the past three weeks, but no judgements have been issued. Two islanders have pleaded guilty to sex abuse
but have not been sentenced.
The trials follow investigations by British and New Zealand police into allegations island men have sex with underage girls, in one case a child of three years.
The trials are the first held on Pitcairn in nearly a century.
Then, a local man was found guilty of murder and later hanged at a prison in Fiji. – Sapa-AP