Jail term given in sexual abuse case

Press, 13 March 1985, Page 22

Jail term given in sexual abuse case

By

ROSS BROWN

in Oslo

An angry Richard Carter, the British schoolteacher who once protested against the deportation of a 12-year-old Fijian boy from New Zealand, left Oslo for London on Thursday. Carter, aged 62, had been sentenced to 90 days jail in a High Court trial on various charges concerning the sexual abuse of three Fijian boys while sponsoring their education in Oslo.

He had already spent 542 days in custody after being arrested in England in September, 1983.

Carter was acquitted on the most serious points of the charges. His defence counsel, Mr Tor Erlingstaff, has lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court. In February, 1983, three young Fijians made a legal statement accusing Carter of indecent assault. Before re-

turning home they told the press they had lived in slum conditions with their guardian.

Carter left Oslo before the police could interview him. Before the trial his counsel made unsuccessful demands that two Fijians, aged 20 and 16, be brought to Oslo as witnesses.

“The prosecution’s case is based on what the boys told the police,” Mr Erlingstaff told an Oslo newspaper. “Telling lies is part of the Fijian culture and is taken less seriously than in Norway. The jealousy of one boy is why Carter is accused.”

Mr Erlingstaff, one of Norway’s best known and most controversial attorneys, called the proceedings “a mock trial.” Carter had been a victim of a conspiracy and of press attacks, he asserted.

After sentence was passed, Carter left the courtroom bitterly exclaiming that the world’s richest country couldn’t afford to pay for the Fijians’ coming to Oslo as witnesses.

“Yet there was enough money to hold me so long in detention.” He will not return to Norway for the Supreme Court hearing. “You can read what I think of Norway and this trial in a book I will write,” he told reporters. Carter made news in New Zealand in 1973 when he battled to halt the deportation of a young Fijian, and made a dramatic personal appeal to then Prime Minister, Mr Norman Kirk. Later he raised funds to take the boy to Norway, telling a national paper that the boy’s rejection by New Zealand was racial discrimination.