Radhakrishnan PriyancaPRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise and contribute to the debate in the House on the International Treaty Examination of The War Crimes Amendments to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—which is quite a mouthful. As the previous speaker who resumed his seat the chair of our Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee Simon O'Connor mentioned the amendments per se are actually two and they are reasonably straightforward. There wasn't a huge amount of controversy within the select committee either. But I do want to situate them I guess in the context of the Rome Statute itself because it has been brought to my attention that not a lot of people actually understand what the Rome Statute is. I for one at the select committee asked a few questions of officials just around what this was and what the relevance of it is to us in New Zealand. So the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was actually the treaty that established the International Criminal Court. It was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome; hence the name of the statute but the court itself is the international tribunal that has the jurisdiction. It sits in The Hague just to mention that as well in the Netherlands. It has the responsibility to prosecute individuals for various international crimes and they include things like genocides. Articles 7 and 8 for example outline what crimes against humanity are and war crimes. I looked into that a little bit just to get a sense of what this court that sits in the Netherlands has jurisdiction over and one point that I want to make that I found really interesting actually was the fact that in article 7 which outlines what crimes against humanity constitutes rape is included as a crime against humanity. That includes also various violations of sexual and reproductive rights for example forced pregnancy and enforced sterilisation as well. I was actually really pleased to note that it was included because we all know that rape is used as a crime within war scenarios. I actually then read this really interesting article that talked about why that is so but I think most of us understand that that's because women and girls are an easy target during wars.So going back to the Rome Statute per se article 7 also includes murder enslavement and torture. War crimes includes amongst a whole host of things the rights of or the treatment of prisoners of war and certain ways in which their rights can be impinged as well. So that's basically what the International Criminal Court (ICC) is there for. Now to date the ICC has opened investigations in about 11 situations indicted 44 people completed proceedings against 22 and convicted six people. There are about 139 States of which New Zealand is one that are party to the Rome Statute and 122 of us have incorporated this particular statute into domestic law. In New Zealand that is done through the International Crimes and International Criminal Court Act 2000. Now getting to the two specific war crimes amendments which is at the heart of what was examined at the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee basically they were done in two tranches. One was in 2010—the 2010 amendments that came about as a result of a conference in Uganda. The Assembly of States Parties at that particular conference resolved to criminalise and bring within the jurisdiction of the ICC a few different things specifically that were used in a non-international context and that is poison or poisonous weapons various asphyxiating and poisonous gases that may be used in specific contexts and also expanding bullets. Then in 2017 came the second tranche of amendments that were specifically added to criminalise I guess different war crimes in both international and non-international conflicts so it is an expansion of article 8 of the Rome Statute and this includes biological weapons and weapons that are also designed to injure with fragments that escape detection by X-ray. So it gets quite specific in the expansion of the types of war crimes that are now criminalised. The final one is laser weapons that are specifically designed to cause blindness. The other thing that I found really interesting about the Rome Statute is the fact that it's based on the principle of complementarity. What that really means is that it works alongside domestic legislation and it doesn't supersede it so that's then why New Zealand chose to enact our domestic legislation in the form of the two Acts that I mentioned previously the International Crimes and International Criminal Court Act 2000—sorry that was one Act. Anyway just going back to that principle of complementarity it means that the ICC will only exercise its jurisdiction if a State party in this case New Zealand cannot or will not prosecute war crimes domestically. So in order to ratify the war crimes amendments we don't actually have to pass new domestic legislation that then includes the expanded list of war crimes; however our position is that the ICC should actually only be a court of last resort. What that means is that if we actually—and I probably should have looked into whether we've had any such prosecutions and none spring to mind but you know if there is a scenario where we can or we should prosecute war crimes domestically then our position as a country is that we should do that first and we only go to the ICC if it's absolutely necessary. So to be able to do that we then have to legislate for the expansion as well to include those two war crimes amendments that I've just outlined and that is the legislation that the select committee chair Mr Simon O'Connor was referring to as well saying that we were anticipating some legislation that might be introduced to the House specifically to incorporate the amendments to the war crimes. That would be amending that International Crimes and International Criminal Court Act and also the Crimes Act 1961. So this was a treaty examination that I found really interesting actually at select committee. We worked really collaboratively because there were some more senior members of the select committee who had a bit more knowledge of what this treaty was and why we had ratified it and actually created domestic legislation as well. But can I just thank those who submitted. We didn't have a huge amount of submitters but I think it was at least a couple at least two—Jamie Strange: Yeah four.PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: My colleague Jamie Strange here has a much better memory; he says that it was about four people who submitted. We definitely heard in person from one person. I want to thank them for taking the time to submit to something that's reasonably obscure to many people. I also want to thank the officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade who took us through both the amendments answered questions and were very patient with the questions that many of us asked of them. So this is as the chair has already mentioned one that is not terribly controversial. It is important in the larger scheme of things because it deals with issues that perhaps we may not have seen a huge amount of domestically in New Zealand but that are issues that plague many other States that are party to this as well and so we do our bit here. So I'd like to commend this to the House.