Locke Keith: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Locke Keith: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10390] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 On Monday of last week the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security began a hearing on the security risk certificate applied to Ahmed Zaoui way back in March 2003. It has taken well over 4 years for this hearing to begin which is a great injustice and I think it is largely the result of the incompetence of the Security Intelligence Service which is the vote being discussed under this point and the delaying tactics by that service. It is so unfortunate that Mr Zaoui is being used as a guinea pig for the security risk certificate provision of the immigration legislation which even the Government admits is flawed and will be reviewed. 
Mr Zaoui has been separated from his wife and family for 4½ years because of this delay. When the hearing began the Prime Minister commented that it was a hearing not a trial and justified the secrecy around the hearing. I think that what the Prime Minister said ran contrary to what has been said by the various courts that have had hearings on the Zaoui case over the last few years. They were quite clear that full and proper standards of judicial process had to be applied to Mr Zaoui’s case and there had to be a high standard of proof that he was really a threat to the security of New Zealand for the security risk certificate to be upheld by the Inspector-General. 
In relation to the estimates there has been a huge wastage of Security Intelligence Service resources on this whole case. Mr Zaoui has been out on bail for 2 years or so now and he is clearly not a risk to the security of New Zealand. He has been giving lectures at universities and is well respected as a proponent of women’s rights and of peaceful dialogue and reconciliation between the Muslim world and the West. In fact he is probably New Zealand’s main expert on this issue and he is recognised as such by many in academia. To think he is some sort of bomb-thrower is very strange. 
One of the problems with due process in this whole question is the secrecy that has been put around the trial. It does not apply to any other judicial proceedings where the material being considered is open material. The whole first stage of the hearing being conducted by the Inspector-General last week and this week is on non-classified information—all information that at any proper judicial hearing should be open to the media and the public so we can see that justice is being done. The second stage of the hearing has another element of injustice to it in that it will not involve Mr Zaoui and his lawyers at all; it will involve the special advocates Stuart Grieve and Chris Morris who have been appointed not by Zaoui and his legal team but by the Inspector-General himself and who are ultimately responsible to the Inspector-General not Mr Zaoui. Also once they have seen classified material in the Zaoui case their instructions are not to speak to Mr Zaoui or his legal team about it. So Mr Zaoui will know nothing of that classified information and that is not the way an accountable justice system should work. 
This is one of the issues that the Greens have expressed over the years. The problem of having a Security Intelligence Service separate from the police is that the intelligence services are much less accountable to Parliament and to the people and they can do many wrongs behind those closed doors whereas the police have a much more accountable system. That was an additional concern for us just a few days ago when the head of the Security Intelligence Service Warren Tucker said that the Security Intelligence Service would like to branch out into the issue of international criminal activity beyond the normal political dimension of the service’s work. That to me would create problems on two levels. One is that the work being done in the area of international crime at the moment by the police—and it is very good work; and they have all the international communications and links—is accountable through the reporting system of the police. It would not be if it were done by the Security Intelligence Service. 
The accountability problem exists for the Security Intelligence Service more than for the police; also if we had this overlap between the Security Intelligence Service and the police in international criminal activities then in a sense the left hand would not know what the right hand was doing because two different institutions would be operating. The problem is that the Security Intelligence Service is just so secretive. In the 50 years it has existed it has not deposited any material with the New Zealand Archive. In fact in 2005 there was another 10-year deferral of material. This secrecy contrasts with that of a partner agency in America called the Central Intelligence Agency which is much more open. Just recently it deposited extensive files back to the period of the 1970s even detailing assassination plots against Fidel Castro etc. etc. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency was very open saying that it is important that the public know some of these things so that Americans can learn from the mistakes made in the past. That does not seem to apply to this Government or to the Security Intelligence Service in that there is still such a wall of secrecy around all the Security Intelligence Service’s activities over the years. I am sure that we have much to learn. 
In respect of the material the American Central Intelligence Service has come out with I am sure there are some parallels with the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service during that same period that should also be brought to light. I am not suggesting there were any assassination plots but other things disclosed in those 1970s US intelligence service materials—such as that they were spying on the anti - Viet Nam War movement etc—were likely to have taken place in New Zealand as well. 
I think the other parallel is that these crimes—one could say—of the Central Intelligence Agency at that time were justified in terms of the Cold War. Today it is not the Cold War but the so-called war on terror that is used to justify all kinds of heavy-handed often illegal and repressive actions. We saw this yesterday in Australia when the Australian Government defied very frontally a judge in Australia who let Mohamed Haneef a doctor accused of giving a SIM card to some British terrorists out on bail. He was immediately put into a detention centre by the Government in complete defiance of the judge. The Government used the excuse that it was cancelling his visa and could put him in an immigration detention centre. So that is just an illustration of executive power against judicial power which is the problem I think that bedevils the Ahmed Zaoui case as well. Through the security risk certificate procedure it is ultimately an exercise of executive power over fair judicial power. 
One of the things that most concerns me about the Zaoui case—and the Government will often say it is just going through the processes etc. etc.—is that by the Government’s action the most virulent anti-immigration anti-Muslim sentiments against Zaoui have been unleashed which one can hear on talkback radio regularly. The Government might say that it would never say things as extreme as that but by its treatment of Mr Zaoui over these years it has given the green light to that element of society to come out with those reactionary sentiments—at great cost I think to the liberal character of our society. I just hope that the Inspector-General despite the deficiencies in the process that has been launched does in the end come up with a just and humane decision. 
I think one of the inhumanities of the Zaoui case is the Government saying it will not let Zaoui’s wife and family come here even for the duration of the hearing. That is inhumane and I think is understood as such by many people in this country. Humanity should be the basis of any good Government. Zaoui’s wife and his family are being penalised. They have been separated from Mr Zaoui for 4½ years through no fault of their own. Their only guilt is to be part of a refugee family and to be the wife and kids of Ahmed Zaoui a man hounded from Algeria. I have seen the torture marks on him. This is a person who is a legitimate refugee determined as such by the Refugee Status Appeals Authority. He has been mistreated around the world and tortured by the Algerian authorities and this is his treatment