In 2004, seven men living on Pitcairn Island faced 55 charges relating to sexual offences against children and young adults. The accused represented one-third of the island's male population and included Steve Christian, the mayor. On 24 October, six out of seven defendants were found guilty on at least some of the charges. Another six men living abroad, including Shawn Christian, who later served as mayor of Pitcairn, were tried on 41 charges in a separate trial in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2005.
The trial was repeatedly punctuated by legal challenges from island residents, who denied the island's colonial status, and with it the United Kingdom's judicial authority. Defence lawyers for the seven accused men claimed that British sovereignty over the islands was unconstitutional: HMS Bounty mutineers, from whom almost all of the current island population is descended (together with Polynesians), had effectively renounced their British citizenship by committing a capital offence in the burning of the Bounty in 1790, they said. According to the Public Defender of the Pitcairn Islands Paul Dacre (who was appointed in 2003), islanders still celebrated this act annually by burning an effigy of the Bounty in a symbolic rejection of British rule. The defence maintained that the UK never made a formal claim to Pitcairn, and never officially informed the islanders that British legislation, such as the Sexual Offences Act 1956, was applicable to them.
