By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS
Kathmandu : Known for his iron-strong nerves and power to stay cool in the face of the biggest adversities, Charles Sobhraj, forced to an indefinite stay in Nepal’s prison for a murder that he says he didn’t commit, is now seeking intervention from the head of his country to help get him justice.
Sobhraj, who grew up in Vietnam and spent a long time in Thailand and India, is now a French citizen who had been living in Paris since his release from New Delhi’s Tihar Jail in 1997.
Sobhraj’s maverick French lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who has defended other high profile and controversial clients in the past like international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, is seeking a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy to ask him to take up the issue of Sobhraj’s imprisonment with the Nepal government.
“The French president is in Afghanistan,” Sobhraj told IANS. “A meeting is likely Friday after he returns to Paris.”
This year, French intervention proved beneficial for several western families who had been trying to adopt Nepali children but were blocked by Nepal’s government on the ground that the kingdom was mulling changes in adoption laws.
The governments of France, Italy and Spain asked Nepali Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala to use the existing law and allow the held-up adoption files to go through.
Immediately after the French Ambassador to Nepal Gilles Henry Garault handed over their letters to Koirala, the blocked process was allowed to resume.
Coutant-Peyre and Sobhraj’s three Nepali lawyers are also readying to approach the UN Human Rights Committee and International Court of Justice.
French human rights organisations are also being asked to protest against the “injustice” done to Sobhraj.
Sobhraj was arrested in 2003 when he came to Nepal professedly to explore new business ventures.
Nepal police charged him first with having come to Nepal in 1975 using a fake passport. When two lower courts dismissed the charge, they accused him of murdering an American tourist in 1975.
The murder charge stuck with the district court finding him guilty and sentencing him to prison for life. A court of appeals also upheld the verdict.
A dogged Sobhraj began fighting the appeal in the Supreme Court in 2005.
However, this month, when the judges were scheduled to deliver the final verdict, they inexplicably chose to reopen the fake passport case and order a fresh trial.
“I am shocked,” Sobhraj said in a statement issued from Kathmandu’s central jail Monday. “I wonder what is the meaning of justice and impartiality in Nepal. Do they exist at all?”
He also says that the only “evidence” produced by police were photocopies of hotel guest registration cards that a French handwriting expert dismissed as “crude forgery”.
“If the Supreme Court does not want to apply Nepal’s law, its international obligations and human rights, I request them to convict me without delay, even without evidence so that my lawyers can appeal and start proceedings,” he said.
In his statement, Sobhraj has lashed out at Nepal’s judiciary, saying that 90 percent of judges are promoted from clerks and lack legal background.
“I believe nowhere else in the world is there such a judicial system,” he says.
He has flayed the courts for unfairly sentencing him, in his opinion, without calling a single witness and without any documents, “only on the basis of fabricated photocopies, an Indian newspaper article, a book from which the district judge misquoted and a ‘so-called confession’ sent by a private individual in New Zealand”.
Resorting to his strategy in India, where he threatened to go on hunger strike if his trial did not begin soon, he has also reinforced his decision to start a hunger strike for “justice and impartiality”.