Peer Alleges Briton's Trial is Flawed

A Briton accused of smuggling a record amount of drugs into Japan for last year's World Cup may be innocent, the victim of a police bungle and a deeply flawed justice system, a peer said in Tokyo yesterday.

Nicholas Baker faces a prison sentence of up to 15 years when the verdict is delivered next month.

Lady Ludford, who is in Japan to press for a fair trial, said yesterday the court in Chiba had ignored evidence offered by European law enforcement authorities. The court also accepted what she asserted was a doctored statement that the suspect signed without adequate legal consultation and a full understanding of the Japanese contents.

"A gross miscarriage of justice is in the making," claimed Lady Ludford, a Liberal Democrat MEP for London and a civil rights campaigner in the European parliament. "He has certainly not been proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt, nor has he been treated as an innocent person."

Mr Baker, 32, from Gloucester, has spent almost a year in solitary confinement since his arrest last May when customs officials found 40,000 ecstasy tablets and 900 grams of cocaine in a suitcase he was carrying through Tokyo's Narita airport.

He claims he was duped into carrying the luggage by a British travelling companion who was followed, but never arrested, by Japanese police.

This argument was given greater force earlier this year, when his companion was seized by Belgian police and charged with tricking three other men, all later released, into bringing drugs through customs at Brussels airport. A similar case involving the companion, whom Mr Brown said he had known for two years before the arrest, is under investigation in Barcelona.

According to European civil rights campaigners, the Belgian investigators have offered to testify in Mr Baker's trial as to the modus operandi of his companion, but the court has refused to accept the evidence.

The British government has urged the justice ministry to review the handling of the case, and questioned why prosecutors failed to question Mr Brown's companion. Two of the three judges in the trial have been replaced without explanation.

Prosecutors, however, have demanded that Mr Baker be given a maximum 15-year prison sentence when the verdict is handed down by the court on June 12. If granted, this would be harsher than the punishment meted out in many murder cases.

Sabine Zanker, a German lawyer with the Fair Trials Abroad charity, said Mr Baker is being punished for refusing to confess, the usual means by which Japanese prosecutors are able to achieve convictions in return for relatively lenient sentences. Some 99.3% of Japan's criminal trials end with convictions.

Ms Zanker said Mr Baker was handcuffed and tied to a chair during his interrogation, which was not recorded or witnessed by a lawyer. This is customary in Japan, where police can hold and question a suspect for 23 days without pressing charges or permitting what others would consider adequate legal defence. Less usual was the unexplained move to place Mr Baker in soli tary confinement for 10 months before a verdict, despite his never having been accused of threatening his guards.

Mr Baker signed a testimony in Japanese. He has since said this was a misrepresentation of his words, but it has been presented by prosecutors as evidence that he must have known the contents of the suitcase.

"The system suggests that people are guilty until proven innocent," claimed Ms Zanker. "The treatment of suspects is unfair when you consider the lack of access to lawyers, the substandard interpretation, the reliance on confessions and the ability of prosecutors to block evidence that would weaken their case."

Mr Brown's supporters are pinning their hopes on the Chiba lawyers' association, which recently decided that evidence from Belgium should be admitted. But even if the judges did accept evidence they have previously rejected, it might not be ready in time for the verdict.