Brazilian child porn case goes to trial in the Netherlands
A Dutch suspect in a Brazilian child porn case is on trial in the Netherlands. 'One would think that a country like the Netherlands would do more for the victims.'
19-year old Pam still has difficulty talking about how she let herself be photographed when she was twelve. Sometimes she wore lingerie, sometimes she was naked, with her legs spread wide open or using sex toys.
Pam, an orphan, thought she was going to be a lingerie model. That was what the photographer in the Brazilian town Novo Friburgo had promised. And 30 euro cents per picture was good money for a 12-year-old. But things turned out differently.
Suspects fled justice
Novo Friburgo, a small town 200 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro, is a textile town which specialises in underwear. Its shaded streets are lined with billboards of women in sexy lingerie. This is where Pam and 23 other underage girls - most of them from poor, broken homes - thought they would end up when they agreed to pose.
But the lingerie shots were only the bait. It wasn't long before the girls were asked to get naked in front of the camera. The pictures were destined for porn sites owned by the Dutch Adult Entertainment Company, which a Brazilian judge says was run by Jerry K., a Dutch former navy officer, and his brother-in-law Johan T.
A year ago today, Jerry K. and Johan T. were sentenced to 21 and 17 years in prison by a Brazilian appeals court for distributing child porn. They had been arrested in Rio de Janerio in 2002 after a police phone tap operation. But in 2004 the men managed to escape to the Netherlands. The two had been released pending their appeal on condition that the Dutch consulate in Rio de Janeiro would keep an eye on them. Instead, the consulate gave them emergency passports allowing them to flee. The incident led to diplomatic tensions between Brazil and the Netherlands.
Today, Jerry K. and two accomplices face an appeals court again - this time in the Netherlands. Jerry K. was initially given a nine-months suspended sentence and 240 hours of community service by a lower Dutch court but the public prosecutor appealed that verdict. Johan T. is not a suspect in the Dutch case.
'Whores of Nova Friburgo'
In Nova Friburgo, Pam's life hasn't been the same since the pictures were taken. "Those pictures follow me wherever I go," she says. "Everyone in town seems to know about them. It was why I left school. It is why I can't get a boyfriend."
After the Canadian photographer who worked with the Dutchmen was arrested in 2002, cd's with the girls' nude pictures turned up on the black market in Nova Friburgo. The photos are also on Orkut, a very popular Brazilian social networking site, where the girls are listed as "whores of Nova Friburgo".
Seven years after the facts the victims are still waiting for justice. Pam has joined a group of six victims who, with the help of the local ngo Projeto Trama, are suing the Dutch state for its role in helping the suspects escape. In the Netherlands, Projet Trama is trying to join its case to the public prosecutor's in the hope of getting damages from the suspects.
The Dutch Labour party last year proposed to pay damages to all the victims but the bill didn't make it through parliament. Dutch justice minister Hirsch Ballin, a Christian Democrat, said it was better to wait for the Dutch trial to run its course. But the Dutch court case involves only three of the twenty-four victims.
"One would think that the Netherlands, with its reputation for the defence of human rights, would do more for the victims," says human rights lawyer Frans Nederstigt who represents Projeto Trama.
Closure
Jerry K. has always claimed that he never knew the girls were underage. He puts the blame on the Canadian photographer who was in charge of recruiting the girls outside schools in Nova Friburgo. But the Brazilian court file contains email conversations between Jerry K. and the photographer in which they discuss how to fix the model's identity papers. The photographer tells Jerry K. that he knows an "ID doctor" who can take care of the underage problem for them.
One result of the case is that the Netherlands and Brazil have since agreed to a prisoner exchange treaty that will allow Dutch convicts in Brazil to serve their sentence in the Netherlands and the other way around. The treaty has yet to be ratified, but according to Jessé Ambrosio of the Nova Friburgo prosecutor's office, "it shows that the Netherlands is not trying to shield criminals of this type. They deserve to be punished."
Pam would welcome a conviction. It would give her closure, she says. Pam is only nineteen but already her life seems to have gone astray. Her father is in prison and her mother has a mental condition. It is not clear how she is surviving. She doesn't have a job or a place to live, yet she seems to have enough money. Is she prostituting herself? Pam stays silent.