Locke Keith: Immigration Act 2009 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Locke Keith: Immigration Act 2009 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
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KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 I begin by doing what the other speakers have done and add the congratulations of the Green Party to Jonathan Coleman and his partner on the new addition to their family. I am sure it will be a great joyful time for them. 
The Green Party will be voting against this bill for the same reasons it voted against the passing of the Immigration Bill last year. This amending bill implements many of the provisions in the Immigration Act that undermine civil liberties and we complained about them during the passage of the Immigration Bill. This is not to say that the Immigration Act is all bad. It does provide a more comprehensive and systematic approach to processing visitors and migrants than the previous legislation. Some of the really bad procedures in the old Act were excluded such as the security risk certificate procedure that Ahmed Zaoui fell foul of. There was a weird provision in the old Act that the Minister of Immigration could get a security risk certificate briefing but it had to be oral and the Minister could not even take notes. This involved misplaced trust in the authority of intelligence agencies and in this case the SIS which is an agency that got it so wrong in the Zaoui case. Thankfully Mr Zaoui and his family including his children are now well settled in New Zealand and he is doing very well. 
Such improvements in the Act last year as against the previous Immigration Act were no doubt behind the United Nations Human Rights Committee recognising our Immigration Act as positive in many ways in the UN report that was issued just last week on 25 March when the committee considered the application of human rights by the New Zealand Government. However this same UN report also criticises several immigration procedures. It proposes that the Immigration Act be amended to “ensure that no asylum seeker or refugee is detained in correctional facilities and other places of detention together with convicted prisoners” and unfortunately that is still the case in New Zealand. 
The committee also wants the Act brought fully into line with the principle of non-refoulement. This means according to the committee that New Zealand should not refuse to hear a refugee claim simply because the applicant could have applied in another country deemed to be a safe third country only later to find that that country had deported the person back to persecution in his or her homeland. I could give examples of that happening cases of people being deported back to places like Singapore and then on to a country of torture where they have actually been tortured. 
The committee also wanted the New Zealand Human Rights Commission to be able to “receive complaints of human rights violations related immigration laws”. That is something the Greens endorsed. In fact last year we moved an amendment in the Committee stage of the Immigration Bill on this very question. As the Human Rights Commission has pointed out it is wrong for it to be excluded from this important immigration area which commonly presents difficult human rights problems. 
One of the big problems in the Immigration Act as it was passed last year was the more extensive use of classified or secret information in immigration cases. There are now 11 Government agencies beyond the police and intelligence agencies—the SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau—that can now determine that their information is classified and not to be fully disclosed to the person affected. Those agencies include such bodies as the Aviation Security Service Maritime New Zealand the Ministry of Fisheries and the Department of Corrections. 
Let us look at section 474 which this amending bill is mainly concerned with. Under the different provisions of section 474 there are broad powers to designate a person as a refugee and protections officer for the purpose of making decisions based on classified information. One of the provisions authorised by section 474 gives the Prime Minister a free hand in designating a body as an agency and enabling it to appoint what is called a special advocate to supposedly handle classified information on behalf of what might be called the defendant or the person affected. 
But there are big problems with this special advocate system. Special advocates are hamstrung in that once they have received the classified information they can no longer communicate with the person they are supposed to be helping defend and that means that the relevance and the full context of the information they have received cannot really be understood by the special advocate. This has been explained by the special advocate in the Zaoui case a solicitor called Stuart Grieve who presented a submission to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee on the Immigration Bill. He was very critical of the whole special advocate procedure and the nature of the classified information he saw. He told the committee that 90 percent of it was information that should have been in the public domain or was in the public domain but had been wrongly put into the classified information basket. 
Under the Act the heads of these 14 what are called “relevant agencies”—and I have said that they go well beyond the traditional police and intelligence agencies—can determine through their chief executive officers what is classified and what remains classified. Even the Immigration and Protection Tribunal whose set-up was provided for by the Act cannot overrule the decisions of the chief executive officers of those agencies in that respect. The State and its departments have veto power over the system even veto power over the tribunal in regard to classified information. 
Reference was made in the introduction to the Immigration and Protection Tribunal which is being set up now by this amending bill if it goes through. There is a problem with its make-up in that it does not according to the legislation have to have on it a person with expertise in refugee law. Refugee law is a specialist body of law and it is important to have someone on that tribunal who understands it particularly as this amending bill and the Act will extend the rights of detention by Government officials. The United Nations Human Rights Committee said that there should be no detention of refugees and asylum seekers with ordinary prisoners but unfortunately that is still happening. In fact under this legislation there will be room for them to be detained even longer. There is an extension of the time of initial detention after an asylum seeker arrives at the airport from 72 to 96 hours without any justification being provided for that increase in time. 
Section 474 also gives immigration officers more powers to detain and to determine that premises can be a place of detention. This is a really important issue because we have particularly in relation to Iranian Christians who have converted from Islam cases where asylum seekers have been detained for a very long time. One of them Amir Mohebbi who has now been granted status in New Zealand was in jail for 4 years. What is in the Act is quite a challenge to what the Human Rights Committee has said in its view that asylum seekers should not be detained in that way. The whole trend of the Act is towards increasing State powers over people who are coming here to an unreasonable degree and towards too much secrecy in respect of immigration processes. Thank you.