Penny Richards
Ambassador, Cambodia
No 16B National Assembly
St
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
26th Feb 2013
Dear Ambassador Richards
Further
to my letters of 20th and 22nd Feb. 2013.
Citipointe church’s thinly veiled
threats to have me arrested, jailed and banned from coming to Cambodia again
have not yet resulted in a knock on the door from the police. I would like to
think that this is because the Minister of Social Affairs does not take his
orders from Citipointe when it comes to having people arrested but I think
there is more to it that this.
For close to five years now I
have challenged the legality of the process whereby Citipointe came to take
custody of and eventually full control of Rosa and Chita – two girls who have a
mother and a father, a grandmother, siblings, are members of two extended families
and are not victims of Human Trafficking.
I am writing to you in the
belief, (or is it the hope?), in your role as Ambassador, representing
Australia, that you have the moral authority to suggest to Citipointe that the
church relinquish its hold on the two eldest daughters of a poor Cambodian family
that it acquired through deception.
Consider
these indisputable facts:
On
31st July 2008 the mother, Chanti, along with her mother, Vanna
(Rosa and Chita’s grandmother), applied their thumbprints to a ‘contract’
presented to them by Citipointe church. Chanti and Vanna can neither read nor
write Khmer and had no idea what they were ‘signing’. Citipointe may insist
otherwise but it is not relevant because the ‘contract’ contains no terms or
conditions and is not countersigned by Citipointe church. It has no legal
status whatsoever.
For
the record, here, in English translation, is the contract Chanti and Vanna
signed:
TO
Director of CT Point International Rescue and Care Organization
Objective: request for my child or grandchild, name: CHANTHY ROZA, sex:
female, age: 6 and name: CHANTHY CHEATA, sex: female, age: 3 to stay in the
center of CT Point International Rescue and Care Organization.
As mentioned in the objective, we, both are mother and grandmother of
the above two children, would like to inform the Director that: nowadays, we
have no house, living along the street and have no job and cannot provide
enough food for feeding the two children. Moreover, we would like the two
children to have safe shelter and get enough food, as well as education.
As mentioned, please the Director permits our two children to live in
the care center by favor.
Please the Director receives the great respect from us.
Regardless of whether Chanti and
Vanna had the contents explained to them, the contract is legally worthless
since it is not countersigned by any member of Citipointe church. More
importantly, no mention is made of Chanti’s visitation rights to her daughters,
no mention is made of how long Rosa and Chita will reside with Citipointe and
there is no suggestion that the girls might remain with Citipointe until they
are 18.
On 11th August, just
11 days after Chanti and Vanna applied their thumbprints to the ‘contract’,
Rebecca Brewer wrote the following to me in an email:
“Rosa
and Chita stay with us until they are 18 or until she (Chanti) can provide a
safe environment for them as defined by LICADHO and the Ministry of Social
Affairs.”
There are several points that
could be made about this statement but I will confine myself, at this point, to
the legal one. What legal right did Rebecca Brewer have, on behalf of
Citipointe, to claim, on 11th August 2008, that Rosa and Chita would
remain in the care and custody of Citipointe until they were 18? As all who
have a copy of the original ‘contract’ Chanti and Vanna signed with their thumb
prints (Chanti, Citipointe, myself and MOSAVY) it makes no mention at all of
this stipulation. And yet, when Chanti complained to Citipointe about her lack
of access to her daughters (contrary to the agreement she and I had reached
with Leigh Ramsay and Rebecca Brewer), she was told that she had signed a
contract giving over her daughters to the church until they were 18 and that
she was entitled to only 2 hours of supervised visit with Rosa and Chita every
two weeks. A total of 48 hours in a year. When Chanti failed to return Rosa to
Citipointe after a visit, the church called the police – claiming that Chanti
was in breach of the contract she had entered into with the church. Chanti’s
punishment for this supposed breach of contract was to have her visitation
rights reduced to 2 hours a month – or 24 hours a year.
I will not, here, delve into the
moral and ethical questions this incident raises but confine myself to the
legal status of Rosa and Chita between 31st July and November that
same year when I became fully aware of what had occurred in the previous 4
months. I arrived in Phnom Penh to find Chanti and her husband Chhork running
two businesses. One was taking tourists of river cruises on a boat (which the family
also lived on) and the other was the stall that Chanti ran at the river’s edge
– selling drinks and snacks to tourists. The family’s finances had so vastly
improved over the previous four months (with no assistance at all from myself)
that Chanti had acquired a state-of-the art mobile phone. The footage I shot at the time attests to this
fact. My footage also attests to the fact that Citipointe refused to allow Rosa
and Chita to join the rest of the family for the water races festival taking
place at the time and refused to allow Rosa and Chita to join the rest of the
family on a visit to the provinces to visit their extended family. What legal
right did Citipointe have for keeping Rosa and Chita separate from their family
at this time?
The good news, however, was that
Citipointe intended to return Rosa and Chita to the care of their parents when
the water festival was over. Chanti was overjoyed and then crestfallen,
heart-broken, when it did not happen. This set the pattern for the next four
years – promises followed by betrayals.
In
Nov 2008,what legal right did Citipointe church to be holding Rosa and Chita in
contravention of the express wishes of their parents that the girls be returned
to the family? I have asked this question countless times and never received an
answer.
Could
you please, Ambassador, request of Citipointe church that it provide yourself,
Chanti and myself (as her advocate) copies of any legal documents that gave the
church the right to be holding Rosa and Chita against the wishes of their
parents in Nov 2008. If no such legal document exists, Rebecca Brewer, Leigh
Ramsay and Citipointe church were in breach of Cambodia’s anti-Trafficking
laws.
Pastor Brian Mulheran’s response
to this legal question is to be found in his letter of 21st Feb:
You are
fully aware that Khuon Ranin, Minister of Social Affairs, Veteran and Youth
Rehabilitation under-secretary of state has publicly clarified (Phnom Penh Post
Friday 13th August 2010) the legal nature of the girls being in our
care as a result of the agreement by which we were operating under the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs. This agreement was entered into while the application
process was being undertaken with the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veteran and
Youth Rehabilitation (MOSAVY).
The question now is: What is in
the contract that exists between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Citipointe
church that gives Rebecca Brewer the right to claim that the church will
maintain custody of Rosa and Chita until they are 18? Why was Chanti not
provided with a copy of this contract so that she knew and understood what it
contained? What legal right did Citipointe church have to be entering into such
a contract with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs without Chanti even being aware
that it had done so?
Please, Ambassador, exert your
moral authority to get some answers to these questions.
In
conclusion, I would like to revisit what Rebecca Brewer wrote on 11th
August 2008:
“Rosa
and Chita stay with us until they are 18 or until she (Chanti) can provide a
safe environment for them as defined by LICADHO and the Ministry of Social
Affairs.”
With no help at all from
Citipointe, despite what the church declares on its website, Chanti can now, as
the owner of her own house, in the village of her husband’s family, close to
the extended family of her mother, provide a ‘safe environment’ for Rosa and
Chita. The church has no intention of returning the girls, however. The
Department of Foreign Affairs, cannot, surely simply stand back and allow this
blatant abuse of the human rights of Chanti and her daughters to occur. Or can
it?
best
wishes
James
Ricketson
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