Delahunty Catherine: Immigration Bill — Third Reading 
Delahunty Catherine: Immigration Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:658;Page:7646] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tena koutou. I am presenting this speech on behalf of the Green Party’s immigration spokesperson Keith Locke who cannot be with us today but is very passionate about this issue. The Green Party is voting against this Immigration Bill; it contains too many restrictions on people’s rights. But before we discuss that I will talk briefly about migration. Many of us Pakeha here and others are descendants of migrants from the 19th and 20th centuries who had the good fortune to come into this country without having to pass through tight border controls. We were protected by an agreement called the Treaty of Waitangi. In that Treaty we were given rights and responsibilities towards tangata whenua and tangata Tiriti which we need to uphold including new migrants. The Green Party would like to see all migrants have a deeper understanding of what our obligations are in terms of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. 
However getting back to this bill I say that in the Committee stage of the bill the Green Party put forward several amendments to help address its human rights deficiencies but none of them were successful. One of the major problems in this bill is the increasing secrecy in decision making on refugee claims residence applications and visa matters. The blanket of secrecy in immigration matters is now to cover many more Government institutions. Fourteen agencies can now determine immigration information to be “classified”. One of the Green amendments sought to reduce the number of those agencies to those who have traditionally had such information namely the Security Intelligence Service the New Zealand Police and the Government Communications Security Bureau. We oppose the other 11 agencies being included such as the Aviation Security Service Maritime New Zealand the Ministry of Fisheries and the Department of Corrections. These 14 agencies can not only use secret material against people in immigration cases but also stop the Immigration and Protection Tribunal and the courts from releasing any of this so-called classified information if the tribunal or the courts decide it should really be in the public domain. This means that a bureaucrat say at the Ministry of Fisheries can veto even the Supreme Court on what should be made public in a hearing and that is a very dangerous thing. 
The Greens also opposed the sometimes vague grounds for determining whether information should be determined classified or secret. For example simply because the information is deemed to prejudice the “international relations of New Zealand” does not seem sufficient. On behalf of the Green Party Mr Locke recently organised a short tour of Aotearoa New Zealand by Ms Rebiya Kadeer leader of the Uyghur people a mainly Muslim people who are discriminated against in the western part of China. It appears that there was some discussion in New Zealand Government circles before she was granted a visa. Thankfully she was. But on one level we can say that the decision to grant her a visa did prejudice the international relations of New Zealand if we are talking about Government to Government relations because the one-party State in China puts pressure on Governments around the world not to grant Ms Kadeer a visa. This pressure was successful in Taiwan where the Government decided that she could not have a visitor’s visa. In fact the University of Auckland administration in an outrageous attack on academic freedom and the freedom of speech cancelled the booking for Ms Kadeer’s Auckland meeting at the university citing the effect the meeting would have on relationships with “Chinese partners”. 
In addition classified information is inherently unreliable because it is less tested in the public space than unclassified information. Mr Stuart Grieve the special advocate appointed by the Government to look at classified information in the Ahmed Zaoui case was very scathing about the quality and accuracy of the classified information that he saw. Yet clause 289(2)(c) of the bill requires the High Court to treat classified information as accurate. That whole case was a shame on this nation’s history. Ahmed Zaoui as many members will remember spent time in solitary confinement even though he was a democratically elected member of the Algerian Parliament. In relation to special advocates it is disappointing that the Parliament voted down one of our amendments to allow the advocate to talk to the person whose interests he or she is representing after the advocate has seen the classified information. Surely we should trust the advocate who is appointed on the recommendation of the Government not to divulge anything really secret like sources. It is difficult for people to properly defend themselves without being able to give those defending them the context of any evidence in the hearing. David Bain for example would not have been able to clear his name under such restrictions as proposed in this bill. 
The Green Party moved an amendment to stop the Minister of Immigration being able to rely on classified information in refugee and protection claims. To be able to rely on such information is dangerous and contrary to international best practice. Classified information can be rumours spread by spiteful people. It can be disinformation spread by State agencies of the asylum seeker’s home country—as was the case with lies spread by the Algerian junta in the Ahmed Zaoui case. Even more confusing it can be slander spread by the intelligence agencies of democratic countries because it fits the narrow interest of their Governments. For example good economic reasons—that is access to oil contracts—made the French Government retell the Algerian Government’s lies about Ahmed Zaoui. To increase fairness the Green Party put in an amendment to allow for appeals of the cases involving classified information. Presently clause 234 prevents this from happening. 
There is an extreme arbitrary power given to the executive under clause 152. Under this clause the Minister of Immigration can deport anyone he or she deems “constitutes a threat or risk to security”. This parallels a provision in the old Act that was used to deport overnight Rayed Mohammed Abdullah Ali an innocent man who had been living freely in Saudi Arabia but after being unjustly deported back to Saudi Arabia from so-called liberal New Zealand he was thrown in jail for a period by the Saudi Arabian authorities. The deportation from New Zealand occurred without any due process or transparency whatsoever. An earlier speaker talked about the lobbying and support for individuals by interest groups and this is why they exist. The law is insufficiently robust to stop such cases from happening. These cases are real and they are recent in our history. 
The Green Party is also disturbed that we have not corrected a fault in the old immigration legislation such that the new legislation will prevent the Human Rights Commission under the Human Rights Act from bringing any proceedings on immigration matters or being party to any proceedings. This is wrong. It is not necessary to restrict the Human Rights Commission in this way. The Green Party is also concerned about the extended detention powers in the bill. No good reasons were advanced for allowing the initial period of detention without warrant such as for asylum seekers arriving at our airports to be extended from 72 hours to 96 hours. Asylum seekers have suffered enough in their home countries already. The new detention powers for those awaiting deportation under clauses 271 and 289 are marked with denial of habeas corpus. Firstly clause 271 denies bail to such people and then clause 289 denies a judge the right to determine that “the period of time that a person has already been detained” is an exceptional circumstance justifying his or her release from detention. This clause comes out of the controversy over the imprisonment of several Iranian Christian converts from Islam for up to 4 years after they refused to sign Iranian Government documents enabling them to be deported to Iran where they rightly thought they might be persecuted. The Iran Parliament has passed the initial stage of a law allowing for the death sentence for people such as them who convert from Islam. 
The Government’s tough line towards asylum seekers is not justified on either a moral or a practical basis. Aotearoa New Zealand now gets only a tiny number of asylum seekers arriving at the border partly because it does not get any boat people and also because asylum seekers whose papers are not in order find it very difficult to get on a New Zealand - bound plane because of tightened advance passenger processing arrangements. In fact these arrangements can offend the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees whereby airlines that allow asylum seekers on board should not be penalised as they are under clause 89 of the bill. 
Another problem in relation to refugees is that the new Immigration and Protection Tribunal which incorporates the work of the old Refugee Status Appeals Authority is not required to have members specialising in refugee law. Unfortunately Parliament did not accept the amendment that Keith Locke moved which was that at least one of the tribunal members should have “extensive experience in refugee law”. The bill also allows much more intrusion into our bodily spaces.