Campaigners fighting the sexual exploitation of children says they are disturbed by the early release of an Australian paedophile from a Thai jail.Bradley Pendragon has been granted a royal pardon and will be freed today.
The 46-year-old was convicted of raping and beating girls between the ages of eight and 12 and producing child pornography.
Pendragon has been in prison in Thailand since 1995 and was due to be released in 2008.
|
Indeed, a series of serious and alarming facts were reported during the past year : arrests, abuse, even “summary executions” of the 173 civilians who surrendered themselves to the authorities in June 2005 near Xiengkhouang, and of the 242 Lao-Hmong who came out of the Bolikamsay jungle in October 2005; disappearance of 26 Lao-Hmong teenagers (21 girls and 5 boys) expelled from Thailand and handed over to the Lao police in December 2005; continuation of the dry season bloody attacks launched by the LPDR troops; death of 26 Lao-Hmong civilians “killed by governmental soldiers” on April 2006; desperate call launched by 46 starving Lao-Hmong women and children upon their exit on July 6th, 2006, of the Phou Bia jungle … The LMHR expresses its strongest indignation and its greatest concern to such acts of violence which, in spite of the repeated denials from the LPDR leaders, seem to deliberately and systematically target defenceless populations. To the Lao Movement for Human Rights, “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!”. It is unacceptable that even after more than thirty years such acts can be committed with complete impunity by a dictatorship which represses the freedoms and basic rights of the Lao people, and which only survives thanks to the assistance provided by the international community.
 Six gunmen who had stormed into a school in the Cambodian town of Siem Reap near Angkor Wat, in northwestern Cambodia on Thursday took hostage 70 children
An Australian 5-year-old boy is held hostage at a private English-language school in the town of Siem Reap, 225 kilometers north-west of the Cambodian capital Pnom Penh.  Synopsis: When Australian businessman Kerry Danes was suddenly arrested by the Communist Laos government, his wife Kay gathered her two youngest children and fled towards Thailand, only to be intercepted by the same ruthless and corrupt police. Forced into a nightmare of epic proportions, Kay was wrenched from her children and told she was going to join her husband, she knew not where. It was then that the real nightmare began.
Held hostage in a gulag at the mercy of a paranoid Communist regime, Kay saw unspeakable human rights violations acted out each day in a place where the outside world can't hear the cries for help. She tells of the journey that brought her face to face with the torture, the struggle for survival and the spirit of those who endure the horrors of inhuman imprisonment every day. REAL MAGAZINE : Published fortnightly by Burda Media and is available for £1 from most bookstores and newsagents in the UK. REAL is unlike any other title in the UK magazine market. It is a magazine that is beautiful to look at yet relevant to women's lives. REAL deals with issues closest to women's hearts and events that could change their lives.  Families of Australian prisoners in Indonesia have reacted mostly with joy at news a prisoner exchange deal between the two countries could be signed within months.Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer asked Indonesia officials to accelerate talks on the agreement earlier this year after negotiations on a similar deal between Indonesia and France bogged down. As well as transferring Australian prisoners from Indonesia, the agreement would pave the way for the transfer of Indonesian prisoners being held in Australia, including dozens of fishermen convicted of poaching in Australian waters. The agreement may allow convicted inmates such as drug smuggler Schapelle Corby and some members of the Bali Nine to serve out their sentences in Australia, but there are reports that the deal does not include Australia drug traffickers on death row.
Indonesia's Minister of Law and Human Rights Hamid Awaluddin has told the ABC that those on death row, including the two Bali nine ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, would not benefit from the deal.
"I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain is immeasurably worse than any torture of the body." Read on.....
By Tom Bishop - 3 June 2000
In the decision, Circuit Judge Richard L. Nygaard of Erie, said Shoats has been in the "hole" since June 1991 "because he is, in the considered judgment of all the prison professionals who have evaluated him, a current threat to ... security, and ... to the safety of other people." ( To read the court's decision click here) Shoats is in "administrative custody" at the State Correctional Institution at Greene in Western Pennsylvania. He is kept in his cell 23 hours a day, five days a week, and 24 hours a day for the other two days. He eats meals alone. He has been denied visits with family for eight years. He has no organized activities, no radio, no TV, no telephone calls "except emergency or legal calls," no books other than legal materials "and a personal religious volume." At the appeal hearing, prison officials acknowledged that they generally are concerned about the psychological damage to an inmate after 90 days of such confinement and would generally recommend transfer to the general population after 90 days as a consequence.
|
||||||||||||||||||||
 The statistics show 6,840 offenders were released from prison in 2002 |
An Australian woman convicted of using marijuana was sentenced to six months jail by an Indonesian court, but should be free within weeks.
A BAHRAINI detainee at Guantanamo Bay has only been questioned once in the last year, his lawyers said yesterday.
Omar Khadr , the nineteen-year-old Canadian citizen who has been detained at Guantanamo Bay for more than four years, wrote a letter to his mother last week telling her that he has fired his US lawyers, the Globe and Mail reported Friday. A US military lawyer appointed to represent Khadr, Lieutenant-Colonel Colby Vokey, said the move demonstrates Khadr's fragile state of mind and that Khadr has no reason to trust his American captors, as the government has confiscated Khadr's legal files, denied him access to a telephone, and otherwise attempted to interfere with his case preparations.
BOURNEMOUTH backpacker Daisy Angus has been sentenced to 10 years in an Indian prison after being found guilty of drug smuggling.
Two Australians were arrested for heroin trafficking as they prepared to board a flight from Vietnam to Australia, police said on Friday.
Figures from the Scottish Prison Service show 6,840 offenders were freed from custody in 2002, with 6,458 men and 382 women liberated.
The SPS said 48% of those released were back in custody within two years and 58% were behind bars within six months.
Men were more likely to return to jail, with 49% returning within two years, compared to 39% of women.
There have been serious concerns raised in letters to FPSS about the health and well being of hill tribe women prisoners in Bangkok's Lard Yao Women's Prison.
CUSTOMS officers in Sydney have intercepted an Australian woman who swallowed 320 condoms full of heroin in an attempt to smuggle the drug into the country.
Port Arthur gunman Martin Bryant has a television in his cell but is not given access to Playstation games enjoyed by other inmates, a former employee of Hobart's Risdon Prison says.
FIVE Australian observers and one Canadian are on their way to Uganda to witness the trial of Dr Aggrey Kiyingi, which begins on Monday.
London - Former Guantanamo detainees, including the 9 British nationals released from the camp, have poured scorn on allegations that the three deaths at Guantanamo were suicides and claim that they are almost certainly accidental killings caused by excessive force used by US guards there.
Convicted Bali Nine drug courier Martin Stephens has filed an appeal to the Indonesian Supreme Court, claiming a disparity in the High Court decision that upheld the life sentence given by a lower court.
The Bali nine sentences have now been released
Hilltribe prisoners at Chiang Rai Central Prison whom I've visited say that conditions at the prison have improved, and are better than at other prisons in Thailand. Of the approximate 4,000 inmates, more than 50% are hilltribe people.
THE outfit is a familiar one for an Australian female facing drugs charges in Indonesia.
A FORMER Adelaide school teacher jailed for heroin possession in Indonesia has been deported from Indonesia after completing a nine-month jail term.
Today, the Inter American Press Association is focusing attention on the deplorable plight of 25 independent Cuban journalists imprisoned for committing crimes of conscience. We call upon the government of President Fidel Castro to release all 25 and immediately provide medical treatment to the 18 who are suffering serious health problems.
A Japanese tourist imprisoned for smuggling heroin into Australia in 1992 has been released and returned to Japan.
On May 2, 2006, U Myint Than, 59, who was arrested in February 2005, died after suffering chest pains and a stroke at Thandwe General Hospital. He is the third political prisoner to die in a Burmese prison during 2006, and the tenth to have died since early 2005.
Dear Mr. Connell,
Chairman Sisavatdy calls for a move to an open, democratic system with multiple political parties.
An appeals court in Vietnam has upheld the death sentence of an Australian man of Vietnamese origin for trafficking heroin, a court official said today.
Guantánamo detainee Jumah al-Dossari attempted suicide in March. He says he has been tortured in custody, and is believed to have made numerous suicide attempts since he was detained, in January 2001. US officials have refused to give his lawyers any information about his current condition.
The National Traditional Chinese Medicine Thrombus Treatment Center in Shenyang City. According to a former nurse who worked there, the Sujiatun death camp is in an underground complex connected to this hospital. The furnace unit on the southwest side of the hospital. There are two doors leading to the underground complex of the Sujiatun death camp. According to the witnesses, the remains of Falun Gong practitioners are incinerated here after their organs are extracted.
A TENSE stand-off was continuing early this morning inside Hobart's Risdon Prison, where a group of inmates was holed up in an accommodation unit after overpowering a guard.
For the Prime minister to suggest consulting Indonesia over West Papuan asylum seekers demonstrates either appalling ignorance or arrogance on the International Refugee convention to which Australia is signatory. This is a dangerous move that will place lives in jeopardy as it increases Australia's convention breaches. Although in effect such a move will be further formalising what has been done behind the razor wire and electric fences of our camps for years" says Pamela Curr of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) Melbourne.
A 24-YEAR-OLD Melbourne woman is facing more than 10 years in an Indian jail after being charged with drug smuggling.
"Every day it hurts my heart to think of what they did to us. I still smell smoke and get nightmares of inmates threatening to bull me and then kill me. We were not the aggressors" says Robert. [not his real name]
A BRITON who spent three years imprisoned in Barbados has written a graphic and detailed account of his jail time at Glendairy and Harrison Point prisons, on a website associated with a support service for foreign prisoners.
Britain has been complicit in the human rights abuses committed by US authorities at Guantanamo Bay prison camp, according to a report released today.
Attention: His Excellency Dr Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
An Indonesia bishop relayed a message of support from Pope Benedict XVI to three prisoners condemned to death after a controversial trial that many observers said was unjust.
"While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges."
Nick is back in solitary confinement, he had already written and told me he may have a little trouble because he had been caught speaking. Yes, I did say speaking, prisoners are only allowed to speak twice a day for a very short period of time, I am told that this solitary comfinement puncihsment can last up to 28 days or longer. Nick has already completed almost 4 years in solitary before he was moved.
Photo opportunity ... Corby's lawyer says the media-staged drug destruction destroys crucial evidence. Picture: Lukman Bintoro
Foreign Prisoner Support Service would like to announce that the Australian Democrats have launched a petition calling for the Guantanamo Bay military facility to be closed and highlighting the injustice faced by South Australian citizen David Hicks.
I used to think that America had respect for human rights when it came to prison.
AN Australian tourist became an unwitting drug mule when 10kg of cocaine was concealed in his luggage without his knowledge.
Detainees at Guantánamo participating in the hunger strike are reported to have been placed into isolation, strapped into restraint chairs, been subjected to painful force-feeding methods and deprived of "comfort items" such as blankets and books.
Kofi Annan suggested a series of reforms some months ago to overhaul the much maligned United Nations Commission for Human Rights. The Commission, the body originally responsible for drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has been tainted by the frequent election of members with dismal human rights records, such as Sudan and Zimbabwe. Annan requested that members of a new Human Rights Council be selected primarily on their human rights credentials. Pesky diplomatic clauses that hindered the old Commission, like that which required 'equitable geographic distribution' of member states, were to become secondary concerns. This was to be a Council of countries that led by example - one that addressed emerging human rights crises aggressively and ensured catastrophes like the 1994 Rwandan Genocide were prevented. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other leading human rights organisations supported these reforms.
FOREIGN Affairs Minister Alexander Downer hopes a prisoner transfer scheme with Indonesia can be arranged "reasonably quickly", but says that during a meeting yesterday with his Indonesian counterpart, he emphasised Australia supported Indonesia's tough stance on drugs.
STRIP-searching of women in Queensland jails has been slammed as "unreasonable and unacceptable" in a ground-breaking report.
AFTER spending more than a decade behind bars for the murder of a Perth jeweller, Andrew Mallard last night walked from prison a free man.
Cape Town - Eleven South African women held in a Mauritian jail on drug charges have been on a hunger strike for two weeks, a member of Families of South African Detainees Abroad said on Friday.
THAI teenager Plarm Pongprom, now in her fifth year in Australia, has once again had her case referred back to the Refugee Review Tribunal.
A Sydney teenager faces years in a Cambodian Jail
A HUMAN rights advocate is campaigning for jailed Bournemouth backpacker Daisy Angus.
