After five months of starvation outside the thick walls of the Danish Parliament in Copenhagen, the majestic castle of Christiansborg, where the Danish woman Kirsten Chesnut has been hunger striking since 1 May in an attempt to get the Danish Justice Minister, Lene Espersen, to reopen her case, the desperate woman is now preparing for death.

While Danish Prime Minister and EU Chairman Anders Fogh Rasmussen proudly receives his V.I.P. guests at the romantic Hamlet castle Kronborg - where the mythical guardian of the nation, Holger Danske, is resting in the dungeans - and grandiosely at the Johannes-burg Summit Meeting promised clean water and sanitation to "every village on the globe", he and his colleagues turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the quiet starving mother on the doorsteps of the Parliament in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Has not Eaten
for 151 Days
Kirsten Chesnut has not eaten for 151 days, and each hour now is critical for her health.

Soon she will either collapse or die, but her spirit is unrelentless, and she refuses to give up until she has been given a guarantee by the Government that her case will be taken up for renewed treatment by a neutral body - a guarantee which the Danish Justice Minister has just refused to give her.

Barely a handful of the one hundred and seventy-five politicians who have a seat in the Danish Parliament have bothered to stop and talk to the lonely woman who has been sitting outside the "Palace of Democracy" since May - most just pass by with their heads high in the air on their way inside to govern the affairs of this highly-sung democracy.

Minister sees No Reason
to Criticise the System
"It took five months of hunger strike before the Justice Minister would agree to a meeting with me, and then all I got was a lot of hot air and sympathetic words for my predicament, but otherwise the usual arrogant attitude from her and her ministerial officials that they see no reason to criticise the Danish authorities' treatment of my case", says Kirsten Chesnut.

These are the very same officials who are responsible for having consistently broken every law in the book in Kirsten Chesnut's case - and the very same officials who review complaints of their own misconduct, a method which since the days of Sovereign Rule in the 18th Century has been the order of the day in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale kingdom.

Authorities Secretly put
Pressure on Courts
Some of these complaints comprise the Justice Ministry's documented pressure on the jucidial system in order to get the courts to pass a sentence on Kirsten Chesnut for 'child abduction' and with this sentence force Kirsten Chesnut to hand over her son to his father in the US.

The evidence of this unlawful pressure on the courts has been removed from the documents in the case by the Danish authorities who had denied Kirsten Chesnut access to certain papers despite the fact that under, among others, the Law of Public Administration she is entitled to receive all documents.

Hidden Documents
Revealed Authorities' Misconduct
The authorities' unlawful and undemocratic conduct only became evident when Kirsten Chesnut's lawyer accidentally stumbled upon some documents among the papers she had received from Chesnut's ex-husband's American lawyer.

Kirsten Chesnut's case started nearly four years ago when she was in the process of divorcing her American husband in Louisiana, USA, where the 45-year old Kirsten Chesnut has spent all her adult years.

Kirsten Chesnut left with her then 9-year old son, Christian, for a holiday in her home country Denmark as she had done so many times before.

Mother Falsely Accused
of 'Child Abduction'
The divorce in USA had not been without problems so prior to leaving Kirsten Chesnut had made sure to get a legal document from the US authorities authorising her to travel abroad with her son.

"During our holiday in Denmark, Christian's father had misinformed the US courts convincing them with false evidence that I left with the intent to abduct our son.

This produced a court decision which he sent to the Danish authorities - and the Danish authorities never bothered to have the very complicated legal American documents translated professionally, so from the start they bungled the case due to some amateurish pocket translations done by their own unqualified staff."

Abducted by 'Heavies'
in Broad Daylight
When Kirsten Chesnut refused to hand over her son under these conditions, Christian's father took some drastic measures.

"He hired two 'heavies' who forcibly grabbed my screeming son from the peaceful Danish street in broad daylight and drove away with him in a car", says Kirsten Chesnut who worried herself sick several days before she received word that her son had been brought to the Czech capital Prague where his father had been waiting for him."

"I begged the Danish authorities to help me find my son and bring him back, but all I got was the same old vague attitude that they could not yield any jurisdiction because I had 'abducted' my son from USA, and now that the father had kidnapped him back, there was no point for them to act - so with the blessing of the Danish authorities, who turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the crime, the father was literally given a green light to kidnap my son and take him with him to the US."

"All I want is to return to the US and take up my life there again and be with my son, whom I have not seen for four years now since I have been stuck in Denmark all this time."

Cannot Return to US
before her Case is Won in Denmark
However, Kirsten Chesnut cannot return to the US before a sentence passed on her in 1998 by a Louisiana court is revoked - and that can only be revoked if the Danish authorities reopen her case in a Danish court of law, and a new court case concludes that the normal holiday with her son was not an abduction.

On account of the previous Danish court verdict of 'child abduction', the Louisiana court gave Kirsten Chesnut a six months prison sentence for 'abduction' of her son simply because the Danish authorities failed to appear in the court in the case which they themselves had instigated at the US court on behalf of Kirsten Chesnut.

The US case had finally come up after a lengthy procedure where the Danish authorities had been hard pressed to act through Kirsten Chesnut's Danish lawyer who has stood by her all along.

But as a consequence of the Danish authorities' negligence, the court in Louisiana punished Kirsten Chesnut in a socalled 'judgment by default' which is the court's answer to what it considers 'contempt of the court'.

"I stood a very good chance of winning my case in the US court where all the mistakes, the faulty translations and the false documents would have been disclosed - but once again the Danish authorities let me down and chose to ignore their obligations, and so they blew mine and my son's opportunities to be united."

Danish System
Never Admits Mistakes
All Kirsten Chesnut wants is to get the Danish authorities to admit their mistakes and to set up a neutral committee to go through her case with a fine tooth comb and start the case from scratch.

But the standing attitude of the Danish System is never to admit any mistakes, and never to remove or procecute any employees whose administration of a case evidently has been the cause of much damage to the citizens of the country - a policy which has been reflected by the powerful Departmental Director of the Justice Ministry, Michael Lunn, who incidentally was among the compromised officials in the 'Tamil Case' which led to the fall of the conservative-liberal government in 1993 and in an Impeachment of the then Justice Minister Ninn Hansen.

In a previous conversation with Kirsten Chesnut, which was recorded on tape, the Director's only comment was that it was „not the Ministry's procedure to act on or punish the misconduct of its employees".

The Ministry's attititude only reflects the procedure which is adopted by all levels of the Danish administrative system - a system which daily causes much grief and frustration among the unjustly treated citizens in the Danish society, and something which only to some extent is reflected in the Danish mainstream media.

No Choice but to Continue
her Desperate Fight for Justice
With the final refusal to reopen Kirsten Chesnut's case, the Justice Minister - who herself recently became a mother and has her baby pampered by the infallible ministerial officials in her warm and cosy office turned nursery - Kirsten Chesnut has no other choice than to continue her torturous hunger strike and her desperate fight to get justice.

"The minister's fine offer to write a letter to her American colleague, US Minister of Justice John Ashcroft, and to ask the Danish State Commodity Lottery to award me a meagre 100,000 DKK (barely US doll. 15,000) to pay a US lawyer to fightmy case in America is a joke, especially because I had applied to the Lottery to grant me 500,000 DKK, and therefore I regard the Minister's offer as a miserable attempt to get my case off her back and pass the buck to the American authorities", utters Kirsten Chesnut who huddles in her many layers of coats and bundles of woolen blankets trying to keep warm in the cold autumn night at her 'home' outside the brightly lit halls of democracy inside the Danish Parliament.

Sang Lullabies
for Former Justice Minister
Prior to that Kirsten Chesnut had made a fruitless attempt to get the former Justice Minister, Frank Jensen, to react. She spent time every day through a whole year standing outside the former Justice Minister's house singing the gentle lullabies which she could not sing for her son Christian.

This took place next door to a 'Nazi Fortress' where a large group of citizens, including the former Justice Minister and his wife, had been singing protest songs that same whole year which finally succeeded in ousting the Nazi sympathizers - while the Minister's wife ordered the police to remove the peaceful Kirsten Chesnut with force.

Nobody stays awake to sing Kirsten Chesnut to sleep, but despite her obvious fatigue and now very frail body Kirsten Chesnut is more determined than ever to fight on as she says in closing:

"I'm staying put as a living memory of the Danish System's heartless and cynical treatment of their own citizens and as a mirror reflecting the Danish Politicians' black conscience - because if I give in now and stop my hunger strike, they will forget about me and my son, and all will be to no avail.

I have to fight on for the sake of my son who needs his mother - and I'm fighting for all the other Danish mums and dads and their children who suffer in silence from the abuse of the authorities."

Export Profits
Weigh More than Children
And through the years the non-profit organisation "The Children's Voice" has witnessed many such cases, similar to the Chesnut case, with victims of 'authority abuse' who end up as silent 'Catch 22' figures in the Danish System where poodle policy, trade deals and export profits weigh more than constitutional and human rights and a normal decent approach to solve such cases and deal with socalled 'dirty' officials.

Without the brave persistance and suffering of Kirsten Chesnut, who has chosen to lay her life on the line for the sake of justice and a fair deal for herself and others, the politicians would just go back to their closed door policy and rest contently in their adjustable office chairs until the next case comes along.

One wonders whether Hans Christian Andersen and Prince Hamlet are not turning in their sacred graves in grief over the persistent Rot in the Danish Affairs of State which threatens to undermine the thin layer of Democratic varnish shown to the world outside the domestic Danish duck pond...

For further Information: www.chesnutsagen.dk 

Email: chesnutsagen@hotmail.com

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