A SEX offender serving time in an Indonesian jail has complained he has been discriminated against by the Australian government because he has not been given the ''Schapelle Corby treatment''.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The 67-year-old retired accountant, who is serving an eight-year jail term for having sex with under-age boys, is angry that the Australian consulate general is not helping him to get out of jail on parole before his sentence expires.
Philip Robert Grandfield, who was sentenced in 2009, was living in Bali for more than a decade before he was charged with the offences. The Indonesian court was told at the time that Grandfield had been living in a villa in Singaraja and was regularly visited by five teenage boys whom he said he paid for sex. Two were under 18 and told police he had molested them.
The victims were aged 16-17. Grandfield insisted to the court he was unaware 18 was the Indonesian age of consent when he committed the offences.
The prosecution sought a longer jail sentence, but the judge cited Grandfield's age and his frankness in admitting the sexual contact as mitigating factors.
The Australian consulate general in Bali has refused to give Grandfield a letter of guarantee, which foreign prisoners must obtain in order to be given parole. The letter serves as a guarantee from the home country that the prisoner will be of good behaviour if released.
The Australian consul-general, Majell Hind, told Grandfield in writing that the decision not to supply the letter of guarantee had been signed off by the Minister for Foreign Affairs.
''In making this decision, the government has taken into account the nature of the offences for which you were convicted and has concluded it could not appropriately extend the required guarantee regarding your behaviour during a period of parole,'' she said in the letter.
Grandfield wrote to The Canberra Times comparing himself with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby, and complaining the decision was unfair.
''I was also due for parole on the same date as Schapelle Corby,'' Grandfield said.
''It seems important to me that other Australians in prison should know they cannot count on getting parole if Canberra will also deny them a letter of guarantee.''
Ms Hind said in her letter to Grandfield that such comparisons were baseless. ''The Australian government considers requests for letters of guarantee or support for parole on a case-by-case basis, and a decision in one case will not necessarily be a precedent for other cases,'' she said.
