Bounty island accused lose appeal delay bid
The Supreme Court of tiny Pitcairn Island today rejected an application by seven men to have their trial on sex charges delayed until Britain’s Privy Council can consider their case.
The men, facing a total of 96 charges of rape and sexual misconduct with women and girls as young as three, are due to face trial on the remote Pacific island next month. Some of the accusations date back 40 years.
Just 47 people live on Pitcairn, which is only a mile wide and two miles long. The island, home to descendants of naval mutineers from the Royal navy ship the Bounty in 1790, is administered by a British-appointed governor based in the New Zealand capital of Wellington.
The seven had sought to appeal to Britain’s Privy Council against previous court rulings that the island is British territory, falls under British legal jurisdiction and that the seven accused must be tried under British law. The men claim Britain has never had control over the island.
But Pitcairn Supreme Court Justice Russell Johnson, sitting in the northern New Zealand city of Auckland, said the men had “very little” chance of success at the Privy Council.
“You’ll be asking the Privy Council, in the death throes of the British Empire, to overturn the colonial law which has applied forever,” he said, noting six judges had already ruled that British law applied to the islanders.
The defence earlier had challenged Britain’s sovereignty over Pitcairn by arguing that the Bounty mutineers who founded the settlement in 1790 had cut all ties with Britain.
Last week, the Pitcairn Supreme Court rejected applications to have the charges dismissed because the four-year delay in bringing the defendants to trial amounted to an abuse of legal process.
A spokesman for the British High Commissioner, who also acts as Pitcairn’s governor, said they were “proceeding with planning for the trials”, due to open on the island on September 23.
Isolated Pitcairn Island is in the mid-Pacific, halfway between New Zealand and Peru.
