ACHIEVEMENT,CHASE YOUR DREAMS, YOU MAY BE SURPRISED WHERE THEY LEAD YOU.


FLETCHER Christian and his Bounty mutineers escaped the law by sailing to Pitcairn two centuries ago. Tomorrow a handful of their descendants will face British justice on sex charges that have shaken the remote Pacific island.The seven defendants - some of whom are direct descendants of the Bounty crew and who overall make up half of Pitcairn's male adult population - will go on trial on the dot of volcanic land halfway between Peru and New Zealand.
The men will be tried in a series of hearings under British law, on British territory, and before a court staffed by judges and lawyers from New Zealand, 5300km away.
"It's absolutely unique. It's like the crumb off an imperial table from 200 years ago suddenly falling into the 21st century legal system," Auckland University law professor Bill Hodge said.
"It's the most remote place on Earth I think that British law can reach," he said.

The sex charges have divided the Pitcairn community and focused unwanted worldwide attention on Britain's last dependent territory in the Pacific.
Many of Pitcairn's 47 residents have bloodlines to Christian and his mutineers, who settled there after the famous 1789 mutiny on the Bounty.
The seven accused face 96 charges including rape and sexual assault.
Their trials are to be held in the island's school as well as a courthouse more accustomed to being used as a community hall.
One-off trials have been held on the island before, but nothing of this magnitude.
The court personnel spent almost a week getting to Pitcairn from New Zealand by plane and ship.
The alleged victims will give evidence via video link from a closed court in Auckland.
"I have never heard of a trial in which every complainant and every bit of the prosecution evidence was on a TV set," Hodge said.
Hodge said the distance between the accused and witnesses presented challenges to the old-fashioned adversarial British legal system, where the accusers are in the same room as the accused.
"Electronic communication is not the same as being there," he said.
"But at the same time I think the accused may have preferred the trial to be at home because otherwise you take those guys off the island and it may well be that you couldn't work the longboats and the other things that are necessary to keep the island ticking over."
There have been calls for a restorative justice approach to the Pitcairn case, involving mediation and the accused making reparations to the victims. That, however, requires the consent of all parties.
"How can they have restorative justice if they're three or four thousand miles apart, because that means literally bringing the parties together," Hodge said.
Accusations of widespread sexual abuse on the island date back as far as 40 years and first surfaced in 1999.
Holding the trials on the isolated island, a mere 3.2km long by 1.6km wide, has been a massive logistical exercise.
There is no air strip. Ships cannot dock and have to be met by the Pitcairn men in the island's longboats, which ferry cargo and passengers ashore.
The last of the 25 people who travelled Pitcairn for the trials - including six media representatives - were met by the local men in boats when they arrived today.
Though there were some "grim" faces in the Pitcairn crowd, everyone managed to get on land without incident.

i AM SO GLAD THAT THIS IS GOING AHEAD. THE WOMEN INVLOVED NEED JUSTICE TO PREVAIL. IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO YOU ARE, IF YOU HAVE COMMITTED A CRIME, YOU MEET THE SYSTEM. RESTORATIVE JUSTICE IS FINE FOR JUVENILES AND IS A POPULAR ALTERNATIVE IN MANY CASES. IN THIS PARTICULAR MATTER I JUST DON'T THINK IT SERVES THE NEEDS OF THE VICTIMS.