Vanuatu Politicians cleared of charges relating to prison break
Updated
Vanuatu's Supreme Court has dropped a case against two members of parliament, over their alleged involvement in harbouring escaped prisoners.
Last December, after the burning down of the country's main prison, Moana Carcasses and Ralph Regenvanu were charged with harbouring prisoners, being accessories after the fact, and being complicit in the escape. If they had been found guilty, the men would have been forced out of parliament. But on Friday Vanuatu's public prosecutor applied to the Supreme Court to have the charges dropped, due to lack of evidence. Ralph Regenvanu says while they expected the charges to be dropped, they did not expect it to happen so soon.
Presenter: Campbell Cooney
Speaker: Vanuatu MP Ralph Regenvanu
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REGENVANU: Basically the Public Prosecutor made an application for nolle prosequi, to withdraw all the charges based on insufficient evidence. And the court heard the application to withdraw the charges on Friday and the court accepted. We were expecting that this may happen with the fact earlier than we expected the hearing was supposed to be on the 12th of October at which time we were expecting at least one of the charges to be withdrawn, because the Public Prosecutor had informed the judge that she was going to withdraw at least one of the charges. But it seems that a conference was held last week and the Public Prosecutor in fact decided that all of the charges were to be withdrawn, and so the judge moved the date forward just to get the case off our backs.
COONEY: What's going on now? Are you going to take this further?
REGENVANU: We have been consulting with our lawyers about whether we should take another step towards getting something back from the government in terms of, to cover our legal costs or terms of defamation or the reputational damage to our name. But we're still negotiating about that and we don't know whether we will or not. I mean they obviously weren't justified and the withdrawal of the charges has shown that, that it was a completely misplaced allegation. For us we're glad that justice has won out in the end, and I think it's shown that it is possible for justice to win out, although some may doubt it in Vanuatu sometimes. But we're just happy about that, yeah we'll see what happens regarding any further action.
COONEY: When you and I spoke earlier this year said that certainly part of the issue and part of the charges was you were raising concerns about the state of prisons in Vanuatu and the conditions for prisoners. Are you going forward with those concerns?
REGENVANU: Well actually I think that as a result of what happened on the 19th of December last year when the prison was burnt down and the prisoners all escaped and we rounded them up again, a lot has been done to address those issues. The government has in fact done a lot to address issues of the safety of the prisons, treating the prisoners, so now it looks as though we have a very good system in place. It's an interim system because they're still looking for, they're still waiting to construct the new correctional facility, which will deal with issues such as separating high-risk, low-risk prisoners in the facility, having rehabilitative facilities, having areas for food gardens and that kind of thing. But with the interim facilities that are in place they have actually separated the high-risk prisoners from medium-risk and low-risk, they've also renovated extensively all the existing facilities, so they're no longer in the state they were. And the care of prisoners has been handed back from the police back to the Department of Correctional Services, who are actually trained in the proper treatment of prisoners, because at the time when the prison break occurred they were under the hands of the police, which was not really what it is meant to be happening.
