Judge: Pig for lucky ‘cell cleaner’

REGISTER your name to clean the stench-filled Wabag police cells scheduled for every second Sunday and you could win yourself a pig as a prize.
This is the word from the Enga province’s latest controversial and vocal judge Justice Graham Ellis, who has set a PNG record to be the very first judge to get down on his hands and knees to scrub and clean the Wabag police station cells that houses detainees and prisoners on remand.
Collectively, these prisons can hold up to 40 or 50 detainees.
Justice Ellis has also invited the PNG police commanders across PNG to contact his office to register and disclose which police cells are also unfit for human habitation and have already been condemned by the Health Department.
The judge made these calls last Friday when he handed down a decision (MP14 of 2010) in the “matter of enforcement of basic (human) rights under the Constitution regarding the lack of Correctional Service facilities in Enga province.”
This was followed, on Sunday, by a 12-man team from the Wabag National Court headed by Justice Ellis, who arrived at the cells to scrub the walls and floor.
Yesterday, the judge called The National to say that they only scrubbed two of the four cells.
He said they would need stronger disinfectants to  scrub the “waterless toilet” on their next scheduled clean-up session which is two Sundays away.
The judge said he had compiled a roster for the cleaning of the cells.
He said: “As that (cleaning the cells) is an unpleasant task, I have decided to show my appreciation by placing the name of each person, who helps clean the police cells in a barrel which, for reasons that will soon become obvious, will be called the ‘pork barrel’.
“When the new police cells are constructed and it will no longer be necessary to clean the police cells, I will draw a name out of the pork barrel and that person will be given a pig, which is already named Porky” he added .
“I chose a pig in order to provide a reminder of the fact that there are pigs in Enga province who live in better conditions than the existing police cells.”