Pitcairn Islanders challenge British laws

Six men from remote Pitcairn Island today launched a challenge to the British laws used to convict them last year of a string of sex abuse cases dating back as many as 40 years.

The men were found guilty under British law of a range of sex charges on the tiny Pacific island populated in the 18th century by mutineers from Britain’s HMS Bounty. They have appealed, claiming British law does not apply on the island.

Sentences of the six men, four of whom face prison terms of up to six years, have been suspended until the appeals have been heard and they have remained free on the island, a dot of land one mile wide and two miles long.

As the appeal opened in a courtroom in the northern New Zealand city of Auckland, the convicted sex abusers followed the proceedings from Pitcairn via a satellite video link.

The Pitcairn Court is able to sit in New Zealand under a special law passed by the New Zealand Parliament last year.

The men’s trials lifted the lid on decades of sex abuse on Pitcairn of young women and girls as young as five years old.

Pitcairn prosecutors told the court the tiny Pacific island had been subject to British law since the early 19th century.

“The development of Pitcairn law is virtually inseparable from English law … virtually from the very beginning” of island settlement, said prosecutor Simon Mount.

British jurisdiction over the island began as early as 1838, when island residents sought legal protection from Britain and flew a British Union flag, he noted.

He cited many documents from Pitcairn’s legal history to show “why it would be common sense on Pitcairn that English law would apply”.

The documents showed a legal system under which a local island court dealt with minor crimes while serious crimes were handled initially by captains of passing warships, and later by British courts based in the Pacific.

Mount said the 1897 trial and hanging of Pitcairn islander Albert Christian for the murder of his wife and child was evidence of British law applying in the territory.

In a separate appeal to Britain’s Privy Council, the highest appeal court for many British colonies and former colonies, the islanders also have challenged Britain’s jurisdiction over the island, arguing it never had control over Pitcairn and therefore, its legal system did not apply.

No date has been set for that hearing.

Pitcairn, which lies midway between Peru and New Zealand, has long fascinated the world for being the refuge of men who mutinied aboard the Bounty in 1789. They later settled on Pitcairn along with Tahitian brides.