Whatever the outcome of the Divisions tonight, I think it would be helpful for the House to know what happened to my constituent whom I visited in Wandsworth prison. I was appalled not only by how horrible prison is but by the miscarriage of justice experienced by my constituent.
In Romania, my constituent gave the equivalent of £2 to a young beggar. Two policemen immediately accused him of having sex with this boy, arrested him and took him to a cash point machine where he refused to pay them off as he had done nothing wrong. The prosecution was based on a witness who gave contradictory statements, and the policemen and the beggar were never seen or heard from again. My constituent was arrested on 11 August and was released from Romanian prison on 3 November 2004 by a judge who recorded that there was no evidence against him and that the original arrest warrant was illegal.
My constituent returned home to the UK later in November, following direct advice from the then consul at our embassy. He refused to give money to his interpreter’s friends to make his files disappear, and so without either his knowledge, or that of the British embassy in Bucharest, he was tried and convicted in absentia—illegally—in 2005. An appeal followed, which led to another trial, of which neither he nor the British embassy were made aware. It was only on 3 March 2007, when he received an e-mail from the Romanian desk of the Foreign Office that he first heard news of these events. It said:
“I am sorry that it has taken so long to get back to you.”
It told him that the Romanian Ministry of Justice had noted that
“you were sentenced to 7 years with…approximately £1,000 fine in moral damages and…approximately £140 for court expenses; your appeal against the above decision was made at the Bucharest Tribunal, the result was that your sentence was reduced to 4 years; this sentence was then open to appeal by the Prosecutor’s Office…and the initial sentence of 7 years was re-set. As far as we are aware, you will not be extradited but will have to pay the damages if the minor involved employs a lawyer to track you down.”
Although the first my constituent knew of these developments was on 3 March 2007, our embassy in Bucharest had been working to find out such information, without any success, for more than two years since the initial trial held in absentia.
On 5 March 2007, just two days later, my constituent was arrested at work in Tenerife, on an European arrest warrant, to serve the sentence in Romania, without any promise of a retrial. He had never been given any opportunity to speak or give evidence in his own defence and was given no promise that he ever would.