Columbia 3 given 17-year sentences

Nuttzz

The trio maintained they had come "to get to know the people, the natural beauty" of Colombia and to observe its now-defunct peace process with the FARC.

Is that the best they could come up with.....

bonkey

irish1 wrote:

As for the men leaving the country IMHO I would reckon that was for their own safety, Columbia is not a safe place to be and especially if you have been accused of involvement with the Farc group.

And you were doing so well until then.....

Yet again, this boils down to "there was possibly a miscarriage of justice, and while we're on about that, we'll gloss over situations where they unquestioningly did break the law as being somehow acceptable/excusable".

The "Columbia 3" have shown as much respect for the notion of law as the system which sentenced them for 17 years appears to have. Standing up and renouncing one action as unacceptable whilst making excuses for the other - regardless of which side you favour and which you villify - is nothing but a display of partisanship.

jc

pickarooney

So someone should do 17 years of a trumped-up charge just to show they're law-abiding folk? I can't say I'd sit around waiting to be arrested myself.

oscarBravo

Yep, that's exactly what bonkey said.

Not.

A Dub in Glasgo

Bloody right I would run, the chances of actually finishing the sentence alive is very slim indeed.
It is going to cause a major major headache for Bertie if these guys get back into Ireland.

Villain

bonkey wrote:

And you were doing so well until then.....

Yet again, this boils down to "there was possibly a miscarriage of justice, and while we're on about that, we'll gloss over situations where they unquestioningly did break the law as being somehow acceptable/excusable".

The "Columbia 3" have shown as much respect for the notion of law as the system which sentenced them for 17 years appears to have. Standing up and renouncing one action as unacceptable whilst making excuses for the other - regardless of which side you favour and which you villify - is nothing but a display of partisanship.

jc

They were found Guilty of travelling on false passports and that was accepted, but international observers who have no connection to these men, stated the Trial was not fair. Just because someone travels on false documents doesn't mean their guilty of other crimes. I mean I could get done for speeding that doesn't mean I'm guilty of other offences.

What the hell they were doing out there I would love to know, but I don't persume they are guilty just because a corrupt Justice system says so.

bonkey

irish1 wrote:

Just because someone travels on false documents doesn't mean their guilty of other crimes.

Did you read my post without bothering to look at what part of yours I was actually responding to or something?

jc

Villain

I did but you spoke about more than just them laeving the country.

*Although it hould be noted I'm suffering from a major hangover

dathi1

Plus anyone that votes Sinn Féin does not have a right to talk about injustices, when we know the type of respect the Shinners had for justice in the past, i.e. the bullet-in-the-head style of justice.

I'm fed up with this bull**** civil war politics...me da was a fine galer but I'm more hip to be PD..The shinners are the bad guys..The Colombian Govenment is great!!

scojones

Meh wrote:

What is the Irish government supposed to do about it? They were travelling on British passports.

[Crud removed and sjones banned for a week for personal abuse. - Gandalf]

billy the squid

you would think after 975 posts you would have realised that personal attacks were not on at all.

back on topic though

There are only two things you can do with a fake passport,

1. use it to enter a country illegally
2. sell it on which is also illegal

so if you have a forged passport, then you are 100 percent guaranteed to commit a second crime.

scojones

Apologies, I'm just very annoyed at some of the posts made concerning the three men in Columbia. None of yee know the full story from their point of view, and we should be thinking like "innocent until proven guilty". However that doesn't really matter because the Columbian government have decided to throw them in jail for 17 years with no new evidence. It's sad that there's nothing that can be done by the Irish Government or any other government. I'm not saying free them, because if they are guilty then they do deserve to be punished. It would be better if they could be extradited to Ireland or the UK and serve their time there. God knows what a columbian prison is like.

unkel

17 years for using a false passport...

Reminds me of another Irish criminal. We all know he is guilty of murdering Veronica Guerin, but we can't prove it. So lets jail him for 28 years for selling soft drugs

Pragmatic, but very dangerous solution

oscarBravo

unkel wrote:

17 years for using a false passport...

Nope. 17 years for training left-wing guerillas.

unkel wrote:

Reminds me of another Irish criminal. We all know he is guilty of murdering Veronica Guerin, but we can't prove it. So lets jail him for 28 years for selling soft drugs

Pragmatic, but very dangerous solution

Except it's not what happened. They served their time for the passport offences. The 17-year term is for the terrorism charges.

Just to correct another facet of misinformation: some people have suggested that it was the Colombian government that reversed the court's decision; in fact it was a higher court that did so. Such is the prerogative of higher courts.

Trojan

O. J. Simpson anyone?

Redleslie2

Ivan wrote:

Doesnt Columbia have feck all birds?

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Capt'n Midnight

What should the Irish government do ?
http://irelandsown.net/pownews8.htm

Monaghan, originally from Donegal, is a former member of Sinn Féin Ard Comhairle. In July 1976 he made a spectacular escape from Dublin Special Criminal Court with three other IRA suspects after a double bomb blast caused chaos.

How about a retrial, including charges for the escape.

And they should be done for using false passport by the country they were in before arriving in Columbia.

http://republican-news.org/archive/2000/May25/25fron.html

Michael Tighe was 17 years of age when he was shot dead and his friend Martin McCauley (19) was seriously wounded by a covert RUC squad in a hay shed a few miles from Lurgan in County Armagh in November 1982.

Ignoring any argument about guilt or innocence, that sort of experiance should be a wake up call. No way he can argue that he didn't realise the possible consequences of illegally traveling to an area where an armed struggle was going on even if it was for bird-watching.

BTW: The judicial system in Columbia is different to the one here, just as the one in France is. From my understanding if the three had aided FARC then they could be considered mercenaries and would not be entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. If Columbia is such a corrupt right wing country where government runs the courts, they should be glad of only getting 17 years instead of being "disappeared" as would have been the norm in that part of the world in previous decades.

Redleslie2

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

BTW: The judicial system in Columbia is different to the one here,

It certainly is!

The turmoil that rural Colombian communities experience on a daily basis is exemplified by a recent incident at the indigenous reserve of Betoyes, composed of a number of small hamlets near Tame, in the southwest corner of the eastern Arauca department. In early May this year, an armed group attacked the indigenous Guahibo community at Betoyes. Three Guahibo girls, ages 11, 12, and 15, were raped by the assailants. A pregnant 16-year-old, Omaira Fernández, was also raped, and then the attackers reportedly cut her womb open to pull out the fetus, which they hacked apart with machetes, before dumping her body and the fetus in a river. That same day, three indigenous men were shot and disappeared. Some 327 of the remaining Guahibos fled the reserve for Saravena, a town in the northwest corner of the Arauca department. Once there, the Guahibos took up residence in an abandoned school, protesting their displacement by occupying a church.

Who attacked, raped, murdered, and displaced these Guahibos? Almost all accounts point toward soldiers from the Colombian army’s 18th Brigade and its Navos Pardo Battalion perhaps working in conjunction with the paramilitaries.

Raskolnikov

oscarBravo wrote:

Just to correct another facet of misinformation: some people have suggested that it was the Colombian government that reversed the court's decision; in fact it was a higher court that did so. Such is the prerogative of higher courts.

So you maintain that the higher court was completely impartial and uninfluenced by the Columbian government?

Good to see that the most fundamental tenants of criminal justice, innocent until proven guilty, is being upheld here.

bus77

It's bad/unreasonable leadership that leads to the creation of groups like this in the first place. I say bring it to the door of the s,hite country maker, Spain.

magpie

From Ireland.com

Colombian authorities claim three Irishmen have fled
Last updated: 17-12-04, 12:26

The attorney general of Colombia has claimed the three Irishmen convicted of training Farc guerrillas in the South American country are at large outside its borders.

Mr Luis Camilo Osorio said Colombia was seeking the help of the international community to recapture the men.

"Unfortunately, we know they left the country but we will try to find out what country has received them in order to see that justice is done," Mr Osorio told Reuters.

There was surprise in Irish Government circles yesterday when a Colombian court overturned a previous decision to aqcuit the men and sentenced Jim Monaghan, Niall Connolly and Martin McCauley to 17 years in prison on charges they were Irish Republican Army members who gave bomb-making lessons to the Farc rebel group.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Dermot Ahern, described the sentences as "very severe" and he said "none of these issues are helpful in respect of the evolving peace process".

Speaking in Brussels last night, he raised the prospect of repatriation if the men exhausted all legal avenues and remained in jail.

The trio had been thought to be hiding in Colombia pending the prosecution's appeal against their acquittal. They said they feared reprisals from Colombia's far-right paramilitary groups - known for killing rebel sympathisers.

"I believe it is possible [to capture the men] and that it is the obligation of the international community to collaborate with us in order to make that happen," Mr Osorio said.

The Colombian government claimed the three, who deny being IRA members, traveled to a rebel-held part of the country's south to instruct the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a 17,000-strong band known by the Spanish initials Farc.

The three were arrested at Bogota's airport in August 2001. But prosecutors failed in the original trial to prove the men were doing anything illegal beyond carrying false passports.

They admitted to meeting with the Farc and spending several weeks near a large guerrilla camp. But they said they were there to learn about peace talks, which subsequently collapsed.

Citing what it claimed was strong circumstantial evidence, the Penal Chamber of Bogota's Supreme Tribunal yesterday overturned a lower court's acquittal and issued an order for immediate capture of the three.

The tribunal said the presence of bomb-making materials on the clothing of the defendants, along with their knowledge of explosives and the fact they were carrying false documents, constituted strong enough evidence to convict.

"Even though this evidence in itself did not constitute full proof . . . it leads to the certainty of guilt," the attorney general's office said in a news release.

The Sinn Féin President, Mr Gerry Adams, expressed "anger and outrage" at the sentences. "This is a grievous miscarriage of justice, which will come as no great surprise given the record of human rights abuses by the Colombian government," he said.

The spokeswoman for the Bring Them Home Campaign, Ms Caitríona Ruane, also a Sinn Féin MLA, said: "We will be taking this to the international forum because there is absolutely no justice in Colombia."

The question is, how the hell did they escape? Or is this Columbian code for being shot in the back of the head and dumped in a bog in Donega... I mean dumped in the rainforest.

oscarBravo

Raskolnikov wrote:

So you maintain that the higher court was completely impartial and uninfluenced by the Columbian government?

Not necessarily, but you're strongly implying - in the referenced post and this - that the higher court was politically influenced. That's a serious allegation.

Raskolnikov wrote:

Good to see that the most fundamental tenants of criminal justice, innocent until proven guilty, is being upheld here.

Pot, kettle.

mike65

The only good news is that Ireland and Columbia don't have an extradtion treaty so if they were apprended here the Provos can't make extradtion a bargaining tool for the GFA.

Mike.

Dyr

Nothing like a jailbreak to bring out the dormant republican in me
go on the getaways!! 100 miles and running!

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Redleslie2

daveirl wrote:

This post has been deleted.

Pregnant women can't be raped?

FTA69

billy the squid wrote:

why would you want to go to a country where you are not welcome.

Because you may have business there, that's why ie the case I outlined where a man went to the USA to visit his brother. If your question is regarding Colombia, I ask you how do you know they "weren't welcome"? Simply because a corrupt and abusive government makes a law it does not automatically mean that it is justified.

FTA69

is_that_so wrote:

This sounds like real Sinn Fein speak, masters as they are of not using one word when a paragraph will do.

Meanwhile back on topic

Forgive my naivety but this is actually illegal, and therefore implies a prison sentence. To feel a need to travel on false documents in the Western world also suggest that you may be involved in some activity that does not comply with legal standards that you wish to conceal. I don't have much sympathy for them, getting caught with false papers and they should certainly have been punished on that basis. That said 17 years is quite a stretch. As an aside I suggest you listen to Olivia O'Leary for a bit more thoughtful input into the "politics" of Irish Republicanism. http://www.rte.ie/news/2004/1214/57live/57live9.smil

The men were not given 17 years for false documentation, they were sentenced because of allegations they were training FARC guerillas. They were originally convicted of the passports charge and were sentenced to the time they had already spent in jail. After the judge was subjected to enormous political and military pressure it was decided the original discredited evidence should stand.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.