SpeechCOVID-19 RESPONSE (COURTS SAFETY) LEGISLATION BILLSecond ReadingHon KRIS FAAFOI (Minister of Justice): I present a legislative statement on the COVID-19 Response (Courts Safety) Legislation Bill.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): The legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.Hon KRIS FAAFOI: I move That the COVID-19 Response (Courts Safety) Legislation Bill be now read a second time.This bill is necessary to ensure that the judiciary and the Ministry of Justice can manage COVID-19 risks in our courtrooms. It will help court participants to feel safe and be safe in the courts while maintaining access to justice and public confidence in our courts. It does this in three ways. First it clarifies the ability for the judiciary and the Ministry of Justice to set and enforce safety requirements for entering the courts and some tribunals. Secondly it enables the judiciary to set safety requirements for selecting and managing juries. And finally it confirms that legislative protections for the public and media to access criminal hearings are satisfied when proceedings are held remotely and entry requirements are in place. This bill embeds protections for access to justice as part of these changes. The bill will not change a person's entitlement to access the courts when they are legally compelled to do so—for example if they are a criminal defendant. All the changes in this bill are temporary. Most of the bill will be repealed when the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 is repealed. A few provisions relating to the deferral and excusal of people summoned for jury service will continue for a further two years. Some members have previously suggested that the evolving Omicron outbreak means that this bill is not needed but this bill remains necessary for access and the functioning of our courts. I would like to re-emphasise a point that I made from the first reading that this bill does not prescribe any requirements for the courts. It does not mandate vaccination or any other specific measures and the recently announced changes in the COVID-19 settings therefore do not remove the necessity for this piece of legislation.The bill is needed to clarify and strengthen the powers of the judiciary and the ministry to respond to changing health risks. We cannot predict how the pandemic will evolve and the bill ensures the judiciary and the ministry can assess what requirements are needed for the courts and implement them informed by public health advice. This could encompass requirements relating to COVID-19 testing and masks for example. Even as we pass the peak of the current outbreak there is an ongoing need to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading in the courts and we need to avoid COVID-19 further disrupting or delaying cases as much as possible as has been the experience of the last two years. I also note that the bill contains important clarifications that are not so tied to the severity of the pandemic at a particular point in time. For example the bill makes it clear that remote hearings ensure the legislative requirements that the public and the media have access to criminal proceedings is ensured. It also ensures people can have their jury service deferred or excused if they or a member of their household or family are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 or if their finances have been significantly harmed by COVID-19. For this reason it is important that we progress this bill swiftly.I'd also like to address suggestions from some members that the bill should have been progressed much earlier in the pandemic. In earlier phases of the pandemic stay-at-home orders meant very few people physically attended the courts when COVID-19 was in the community. General alert level settings along with operational measures and specific legislative tweaks were sufficient to manage risks at that time. In October and November of last year the Government considered implications for the courts in progressing the COVID-19 Response (Vaccinations) Legislation Act of 2021 and the COVID protection framework. We ultimately decided a more tailored approach was needed to ensure we had an approach that respected the court's constitutional independence as a separate branch of Government and presumed access to and public confidence in the courts. The current bill reflects those principles and was developed in close consultation with representatives of the judiciary. Can I now turn to the recommendations that have come about from the Justice Committee. The committee recommends by a majority the bill be passed with small changes that the Government fully supports. And can I thank the members of the Justice Committee for their thorough consideration of the bill within a shortened committee process. I also thank the 126 submitters who took the time to give their views on this bill to the committee. Taking into account feedback from submitters and the advice from the Regulations Review Committee the Justice Committee recommended changes to make the bill's intended scope and purpose even clearer. These changes will support the bill's intent of managing safety risks while preserving access to justice. The committee's most substantive changes clarify the scope of the safety requirements that the judiciary may set to manage COVID-19 risks in jury trials. Ensuring the judiciary can set these requirements will help manage the risks associated with jury trials. Selections for juries involve over 100 or more strangers who are compelled to be present at court and will usually involve jurors being in close proximity for several hours to several weeks. These safety requirements can only be set if the judiciary considers them reasonably necessary in the interests of justice and to protect health and safety in the court taking COVID-19 into account. The Justice Committee also emphasised the requirements are not intended to override the existing juror-related law. They will apply in addition to the existing law not instead of it. Several submitters also suggest ways the safety requirements could be further targeted and the committee agreed that the bill could further clarify the intended scope of the safety requirements in some areas. I support these changes because jury trials are a core part of our justice system and it's important that the law is as clear as possible. The committee also recommended the bill more specifically address the interaction between safety requirements and a provision in the Juries Act of 1991 relating to a person's qualification to be a juror. The committee recommends that the intent of the provision could most clearly be achieved if the bill provides that a person must not serve as a juror on a particular occasion if their jury service has been deferred or excused on the basis that they do not meet the safety requirements that are set by the judiciary. This change makes it very clear that core juror qualification requirements cannot be overridden by the bill. The committee also recommended an amendment to make it more explicit that safety requirements cannot vary the circumstances in which a court may proceed with fewer than 10 jurors—and this is a useful clarification from the committee. As well as discussing what the bill does achieve I do think it's important to provide assurance about what the bill is not doing. Many submitters opposed to the bill appeared to believe that the bill created a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for entering the courts. As I have outlined the bill does not mandate vaccination or any other measures for entering the courts or participating in juries. The judiciary and the ministry will assess safety risks and identify necessary safety requirements in accordance with safeguards for access to justice. The judiciary and the ministry are looking ahead to the requirements that will be necessary once the bill is in place and are seeking public health advice and reviewing the implications of recent health announcements.I'd also like to be clear that the bill also does not extend or restrict the circumstances in which remote technology can currently be used in our courts. Some submitters understood the bill to enable much wider use of remote hearings and this is not correct. Existing criteria and protections that apply to the use of remote hearings will continue to apply unchanged. The Criminal Procedure Act contains protections to ensure public and media access to criminal hearings and the bill clarifies that these protections are satisfied if the hearing proceeds remotely and the public or media has to observe via audio-visual or audio technology and that's an important protection to make sure that is continued. This bill supports consistent clear and robust safety requirements in our courts. It is critical to support our courts to continue to operate safely and maintain access to justice. At this point can I thank the judiciary the ministry and the Law Society for the work that they've undertaken over the last two years to ensure that justice in our courts and the court system and the justice system has been able to continue to operate despite the challenges of COVID-19. In particular can I thank the outgoing president of the New Zealand Law Society Tiana Epati for the work that she has done to make sure that members of the Law Society have been informed and can contribute to the protections in the court system to make sure that their clients are best served. I commend this bill to the House.