Washington With 10 American Baptist missionaries in Haiti now charged with kidnapping for attempting to take 33 children out of the country, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday the case is for Haiti to decide."Obviously, this is a matter for the Haitian judicial system," Clinton told reporters at the State Department. "We're going to continue to provide support as we do in every instance like this to American citizens who have been charged and hope that this matter can be resolved in an expeditious way, but it is something that a sovereign nation is pursuing based on the evidence that it presented when the charges were announced."
Clinton said the U.S. Embassy in Haiti is providing consular services and the American ambassador is speaking with his counterparts in the Haitian government.
"We have full access" to the Americans, she said.
The 10 missionaries were charged Thursday with kidnapping children and criminal association. Under Haitian law, anyone accused of kidnapping a child is not eligible for bail, the attorney general's office said.
Conviction on the kidnapping charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison; the criminal association charge carries a penalty of three to nine years, according to a former justice minister.
Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN's "Larry King Live" on Thursday that the judge in the case has three months to decide whether to prosecute. "We hope that he will decide long before those three months," he said. "He can release them, he can ask to prosecute them."
If a decision is made to prosecute, the case would be heard before a jury, he said.
Bellerive told CNN the Haitian government was open to the possibility of the case being transferred to a U.S. court, but said the request would have to come from the United States. "Until now, I was not asked," he said.
In Washington, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley confirmed that "we have not had any discussions with Haitian officials about shifting prosecution to the United States."
"This is a Haitian legal process. Obviously, the 10 American citizens have been charged under Haitian law," he said.
"It would appear, based on the reporting that we've seen, that they ... were attempting to move those children out of Haiti without the authorization of the Haitian government. We recognize that that is a potential violation of Haitian law. The judge in this case has interviewed the Americans, he has evaluated the evidence that has been presented to him."
The Americans have their own legal representation, Crowley said, and U.S. officials are talking with Haitian officials about how the cases will unfold.
He said the U.S. will continue to monitor the situation closely.
The Americans were turned back a week ago as they tried to take the children across the border into the Dominican Republic without proper documentation. They said they were going to house them in a converted hotel in that country and later move them to an orphanage they were building there.
The Americans have said they were just trying to help the children leave the earthquake-stricken country.
Some of the detained Americans have said they thought they were helping orphans, but their interpreters told CNN this week that they were present when group members spoke with some of the children's parents. Some parents in a village outside Port-au-Prince said they had willingly given their children to the Americans, who promised them a better life, and who said the parents could see their children whenever they wanted to.
Government approval is needed for any Haitian child to leave the country, and the group acknowledged that the children had no passports.
Some members of the group belong to Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, where the pastor asked for privacy and would not discuss the matter."I know you have many questions but we don't have answers right now," Assistant Pastor Drew Ham said in a note to reporters.CNN's Jill Dougherty in Washington contributed to this report.
Read More
