Serial killer Sobhraj looks for escape clause

Calcutta News.Net
Monday 1st December, 2008

Serial killer, Charles Sobhraj, who is serving a life sentence in Nepal for the 1975 murder of an American tourist, has now moved the UN for justice, filing a complaint against the Nepalese government.

This is not the 64-year-old celebrated international criminal's first complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee.

Nepal is among the 162 states that are party to the UN pact and Sobhraj is alleging that the country has been violating his rights since 2004, when it pronounced him guilty of the murder of an American tourist and sent him behind bars for 20 years.

In 2004, he was found guilty of the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975.

Sobhraj, also known as 'the Bikini Killer', says he is caught between a tardy judicial system that has not been able to pronounce a final verdict on him even after four years and a prison system that treats him as highly dangerous and withholds the privileges allowed to other inmates.

Sobhraj's Paris-based French lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre filed a complaint with the UN committee last week, saying her client is being held prisoner in Kathmandu without evidence while the judicial authorities have been dawdling on his appeal for four years.

The appeal to the UN rights body comes after two earlier ones were rejected.

In her current complaint, the French lawyer has said that since the case has far exceeded a reasonable deadline, it ought to be examined by the UN panel.

The lawyer says that Nepal's Supreme Court proceedings are erratic, absurd, endlessly and indefinitely postponed, and without any determined timeframe.

There have been 38 hearings on the appeal without the judges delivering the final verdict.

Once, she says, the hearing was postponed because one of the judges was absent due to his daughter's wedding.

The lawyer also says in her complaint that police have not been able to produce the original documents which they say prove that Sobhraj had come to Nepal in 1975.

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