Locke Keith: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Locke Keith: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:638;Page:8503] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is disappointed that the Government has come forward with the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill. We are disappointed because the Government is not taking account of the much greater awareness now compared with in 2002 when the Terrorism Suppression Act was passed that there has been an international overreaction in anti-terrorism measures. There is a recognition now that many of the anti-terrorist measures driven out in the United States have detrimentally affected human rights. We see an almost universal revulsion at the treatment by the United States of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay where due process has been very limited. A common concern of the critics has been that the executive branch of Government has been given excessive power to determine whether people or groups are terrorists with little judicial constraint or due process. 
Instead of saying: “Whoa we haven’t gone as far down the repressive track as America Australia and Britain.”—and that is good—this bill is actually bringing us closer to those countries. For example when the Terrorism Suppression Act was being debated in 2002 the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee went to great lengths to make sure the judiciary could review the Prime Minister’s terrorist designations 3 years on. This bill destroys all that work with a new provision that the executive branch in the form of the Prime Minister will review its own designations. All that remains in the bill is a general power of judicial review—something common to ministerial action in a range of fields—which applies really only in points of law and is very difficult time consuming and expensive for anyone wrongly designated as a terrorist. 
The section of the bill to automatically transfer the United Nations list to the New Zealand list also takes out any opportunity for due process to apply. Previously there was a common-sense qualification that the transfer would be automatic “in the absence of evidence to the contrary”. It would be the height of injustice for New Zealand to possess incontrovertible evidence that a New Zealander had wrongly been designated a terrorist by the UN yet still put that person on the New Zealand terrorist list and consequently have all of his or her property seized. Yet that is exactly what this provision in the bill proposes to do. 
It is well known that the UN process whereby the Counter-Terrorism Committee designates terrorist entities is seriously flawed. It operates entirely on the basis of the committee trusting that Governments have correct information when they put forward entities for inclusion on the list and that these Governments are not influenced by prejudicial political agendas. Any person or group challenging its own inclusion on the UN terrorist list has two hurdles in its way if it wants to get off the list. Firstly it has to get a Government to back it which means given that most of the designations are from America that the Government needs to be confident enough to take on the superpower—which is not a lot of Governments. 
 The Swedish Government tried to get three of its citizens of Somali origin off the list but had only partial success after a long-drawn-out process. To get a person or group off the list there has to be a consensus of Governments including the United States which is not easy. There has been an attempt by some European Governments such as Germany Sweden and Switzerland to have a fairer listing and de-listing process on the counter-terrorism committee with some ability to test evidence but this initiative has not gone very far. 
The problem the UN has faced all along which is why it has never come up with a clear definition of terrorism is that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. We all know that the Muldoon Government called Nelson Mandela a terrorist and that New Zealand Government officials labelled the East Timorese under Xanana Gusmão as terrorists. In one sense they were correct in that some of the armed actions of both the South African and East Timorese liberation movements killed civilians. But the terrorist label is inappropriate because such actions were not the main aspect of their liberation struggle and the Governments they were fighting—which the New Zealand Government had good relations with—were terrorising the people on a much greater scale. 
The same applies to some of the popularly supported nationalist groups operating in the world today that have also been labelled as terrorists such as Hamas and Al Fatah in Palestine. Again strangely enough the Israeli Government is generally not labelled terrorist even though its forces are responsible for more than 90 percent of the civilians killed in Israel and Palestine over the past year. In Western countries where Governments lean more towards Israel Hamas supporters are more liable to be caught under anti-terrorist laws whereas in Arab nations it would be more likely to be those who support the Israeli Government. 
So we can see the problem the United Nations has. That is why it is so bad that this bill takes out a qualification carefully put into the 2002 Act that New Zealanders could support a liberation movement even if that movement engaged in some terrorist acts provided such support was used “for the purpose of advocating democratic government or the protection of human rights.” Taking this qualification out could mean—depending on which foreign Governments New Zealand might be wanting to impress at the time—the criminalising of New Zealanders who support the nationalist struggles in places like Palestine Chechnya the Kurdish areas of Turkey West Papua or Sri Lanka. The opportunities for such criminalisation are increased by the looseness of the definition of “terrorist act” in the 2002 Act which goes well beyond some of the better overseas definitions such as that in the Security Council Resolution 1566 in 2004 which describes terrorism as “criminal acts including those against civilians committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury or taking of hostages with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public …”. 
In the New Zealand Act’s definition people with no intention of harming anyone or of destroying property can still qualify as terrorists. They can simply be putting pressure on the Government for “ideological political or religious reasons” by causing “serious disruption to an infrastructure facility if likely to endanger human life”. This could catch even non-violent liberation movements that engage in mass strikes demonstrations or civil disobedience campaigns. In a New Zealand context the mass disruptive activity by protesters against the 1981 Springbok Tour comes to mind. Perhaps some of those 1981 protesters would have been charged under the Muldoon Government for committing a terrorist act that now becomes a separate offence under this amendment bill with a maximum penalty of life. This could lead not only to injustices if a really bad Government comes to power in New Zealand but also to problems and inconsistencies in our legal system. 
Already any of the crimes that could be covered under the broad definition of terrorism in the Act—from murder and kidnapping to lesser offences—are covered by particular provisions in the Crimes Act and have their own particular penalties. There is also the mistaken and prejudicial assumption running through the Act and reinforced by this bill that lawbreakers who have a political motive have a bad political motive or at least should be treated as such. This is the reasoning behind taking out that qualification—that it is not an argument for the defence that a supporter of an alleged terrorist was doing so “for the purpose of advocating democratic government or the protection of human rights”. 
Back in 1981 a contrary reason applied in most Springbok Tour cases in that judges and juries actually let off people or reduced penalties for their lawbreaking because of their good political motives—that is these New Zealanders were acting in the interests of the oppressed black people in South Africa. Much of the credit New Zealand has in South Africa today is as a result of black South Africans seeing on their TVs the sacrifice that ordinary New Zealanders made for their cause back in 1981. Let us hope that when people in places like Palestine and West Papua finally win their freedom they will also be able to remember that there were New Zealanders who supported them and whose ability to do so was not constrained by anti-terrorism legislation such as we have before us today. 
It would also enhance our country’s international reputation as a peacemaker in countries where there is internal conflict not to have determined one of the parties—generally the non-Government party—to be terrorist. Such open-mindedness or even-handedness opens the door for New Zealand to do serious peacemaking of the sort we did in Bougainville a few years ago. I think we have a mission internationally to be a good peacemaker and to recognise that in most countries where there is a conflict it is generally the case that the Government in the conflict often commits more terrorist acts than the non-governmental group that it is fighting. 
We have to take an even-handed approach. If we remember what has happened in Northern Ireland we see that one of the reasons why there was able to be that political engagement between the British Government Sinn Fein and the Unionists was that Sinn Fein was never made illegal even though the IRA was. Sinn Fein was never made illegal so that allowed for the engagement to take place. The same applies in many conflicts around the world. Although we might always criticise terrorist acts and never justify them we often have to engage with groups who commit them as part of their struggle—critical of them though we may be. Thank you.