Were Convicted Czechs Tricked into Admitting Guilt?
The two Czech nationals recently convicted of bug smuggling in India claim they were duped, and maintain their innocence in an interview recently published on livemint.com. The men claim that Indian forest officials convinced them to sign twenty blank sheets of paper, which were later completed with a false inventory of seized insects.
Really? I'm pretty sure the first rule of being arrested in a foreign country is don't sign your name to anything you can't read, let alone to blank sheets of paper. These men are described by their peers as scholars, and yet they didn't have the sense to learn if any regulations would prohibit them from collecting insects in an area known for illegal bug smuggling.
In answer to the charge they were planning to sell the rare insects to Chinese markets for medicinal uses, Emil Kucera insists this is not the case. He asserts that the insects he and Petr Svacha collected would be unfit for human consumption, because they were killed using formaldehyde and ethyl acetate. The Chinese don't exactly have a great track record when it comes to protecting the public from toxic substances in their foods and medicines, so I personally don't find this argument holds water.
I'm trying, really trying, to believe the story Kucera and Svacha tell. But none of this makes much sense, and I'm still inclined to think these men deserved to be convicted of collecting without proper permission, if nothing else.
Comments
Insect poaching has become very common in India of late. There are many factors contributing to the increase in this illegal activity, the major being that most Indians are not even aware that some insects are protected and the collecting insects for commercial sales is illegal. The second reason is that most do not really care. There are organizations for the protection of animals and preventing cruelty against them but there are none, so far as I know, that acts in the interests of insect species.
OPEN LETTER TO THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE INDIAN GOVERNMENT
Esteemed and honored high representatives of India,
I turn to you as a person, who has been carefully following from the very beginning all happenings in the cause of my colleagues and fellow citizens Dr. Petr Švácha and Emil Kučera, being held in your country on account of the unauthorized collection of insects. I am in contact with them practically every day, and I have at hand all the documents, which were falsified by the forest officials. I have patiently waited two-and-a-half months for adjudication, and I have believed to the last that the judgment cannot turn out other than that:
A/ both will be acquitted of guild originating on the basis of falsified and fabricated charges
B/ point A will be in return widened to include a note of issue to Mr. Utpal Kumar Nag and his co-workers for falsified and fabricated “confessions”, and for the non-substantiated motion of apprehension, where they spent more than a month in a single cell together with another thirty prisoners on account of strikes.
From the very beginning their basic human rights have been infringed upon, to the holding of which India bound itself in the year 1948 (I can add incriminating evidence).
I will now return to the “judgment” of 10.9.2008, if this document can in any possible manner be called “a judgment”, when one and the same judge, on the basis of indictments from fabricated and falsified confessions and other untrue documents, practically identical for both the accused, frees one of the participants with the addition that he became a victim of an unfortunate misunderstanding, and the other he sentences to three years incarceration.
I am curious, is that because of the fact, that one is a worldwide known and renowned expert in the field of entomology, while the other is merely a “so-called” amateur in that same field? Or is the judgment simply in the spirit of the old proverb: “you want to have your cake and eat it too”?
If it is according to the former, then I feel it necessary to bring attention to the fact, that Emil Kučera, although a less-known amateur is an irreplaceable figure in this field. Though he himself publishes very little, he is, however, a top-notch entomologist in the field. To his credit, his name bears about thirty newly described types of beetle, even one entire genus is named after him, and on the whole he found around one-hundred new taxa unknown to science. If you will take a look at the statements of renowned world specialists, at their submissions to the petition of the Czech Entomological Society: http://www.petitiononline.com/h3e09s05/petition.html, then you will find out that he works together with various institutions and specialists, and everyone declares in the sense, that the material, to which Emil Kučera devoted himself, he did not sell, as is rather often claimed about him. In connection with this I must mention also, that longer now than two months their situation is in conflict with all laws, with their good reputation trampled by the claims of various media, that they hunted rare and endangered insects in the National Park without permission just for commercial purposes, without any of the stated having been evidenced to them. I have information (not from the accused), that on the day of 10.9.2008 before the commencement of the judicial hearing their counsels shouted at the named, that either they will sign a confession and receive three years, or, if they will not do so, each will receive seven years. This is the most outrageous trampling on human rights and freedoms, in utter discord with documentation underwritten by India in the year 1948. Do the laws of India make such conduct from the counsel, who in every democratic country must stand alongside the accused and protect their rights, at all possible?
It would interest me, whether any one of the head representatives of India addressed the statement given on 8.7.2008 in the Indian paper “The Telegraph”, where the chairman of the bar association of Eastern Bengal, Mr. Arun Kumar Sarkar, wrote:
“Both have the right to request legal help. But their right to justice is denied them. The Bengal government will have to be accountable for the collapse of the judicial system in the hills,” said Sarkar.
The attorney added that the high court concealed a letter sent fourteen days before by the bar association with a request to transfer the case from Darjeeling to Siligur in view of the situation in the hills. “This is a constitutional crisis, and yet both the state government and high court are silent.”
Egregious lies and counterfeit documents from the foresters have not only been damaging the reputation or our two leading experts for more than two months now, but it is necessary in this context to once more pay an old proverb heed: “that a lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth”.
For some time now it is not merely about the names Švácha and Kučera. Everything has been considerably politicized; both our colleagues serve as unwilling hostages of the mountainous Eastern Bengal region demonstrated in their requests to part from Eastern Bengal. At this point it is about the good or bad reputation of all India, a country with a fantastic cultural past, a country, where people such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi were born and lived, a country with an incredible amount of monuments, traditions, and last but not least a country with remarkable natural richness.
I firmly believe that after a thorough study of this letter, by the honor of entrusted authorities you will do everything to clear our two colleagues, noted scientists, and that it will not be necessary to put this already profaned cause to an international tribunal. The only thing that our colleagues perpetrated was that they broke a law from the year 2002 through ignorance. This offence, and here it is necessary to emphasize the word ‘offence’, which is not ‘criminal act’, would be solved by a fine on the spot in every democratic state, and at the most, besides a fine, their hunting supplies would be confiscated. The unjustified arrest lasting longer than a month greatly surpasses the financial recourse for the stated offence. Concerning the indictment, record from the interrogation, and the other falsified documents, it is yet fitting to add that two eminent Czech attorneys expressed identically, that a similar indictment with such fabricated confessions not only would not be accepted by any court in the European Union, but also no court in any democratic country.
This open letter will serve as an attachment to the signature sheets in the scope of demonstrations and meetings, which are going to take place in the coming days for support of complete absolution from guilt for both of our colleagues and all these materials will be given over to Indian embassies in individual countries.
In Prague 15.9.2008
Vladislav Malý
Na Hrobci 410 / 1, 128 00 Praha 2
Česká Republika, e-mail: entotera@login.cz
Member of the Czech Entomological Society, of two entomological societies in Austria, of the Italian Entomological Society GMSN-AICS, member of the European association AEC, of the Entomological Society of the USA, and member of the SCARAB TEAM attached to the University and state museum in Nebraska.