Endorsing Sri Lanka to host the next (2013) conference was a slap in the face for those calling for an independent international investigation into the 2009 massacre in northern Sri Lanka and an end to the ongoing persecution of the Tamils. To his credit, Canadian PM Stephen Harper had said he would boycott the next CHOGM if it was held in Sri Lanka.

Proposals from the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) to strengthen CHOGM’s ability to deal with human rights violations were either deferred or rejected. A key EPG recommendation had been for a new commissioner on the rule of law, democracy and human rights who would have a mandate to speak out. This was knocked on the head by some southern African and south Asian nations.

The EPG pointed out the short-comings of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG), made up of foreign ministers, which has been weak in addressing human rights violations. While Commonwealth members (eg. Fiji) have been suspended after there’s been a military coup CMAG has failed to implement the 1991 Harare Declaration and condemn “severe and persistent violations of democracy and human rights.”

There is no better illustration of this than the Commonwealth’s failure to act over the atrocious human rights situation in Sri Lanka and the complete denial of accountability by the Rajapakse government for the 2009 genocide. A Canadian EPG member, Senator Hugh Segal, said the failure over Sri Lanka “speaks to the thesis of [Commonwealth] irrelevance.” Our government seems to have kept a low profile at this CHOGM, which is a pity when so much is at stake, including the very future of the Commonwealth.

The House grants outgoing MPs a chance to reflect on their time in Parliament with a valedictory speech. You can watch Sue and Keith reflect on their 12 years as Green MPs below.

Sue Kedgley

Keith Locke

Both Keith and Sue’s tireless dedication will be sadly missed. But, as Sue showed in her speech, the baton has been passed on and we’ve got heaps of awesome young faces coming through.

The Clark government’s cover story for the 61 New Zealand army engineers sent into Basra (Iraq) in September 2003 was also faulty. Supposedly they were there doing civilian reconstruction work, but I noticed in Navy Today that they were also repairing rigid radar and combat support boats for the British unit within which the Kiwis were embedded. I asked Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen about this in the House, and got the rather alarming and confused reply that “if they are being used in patrol, it may well be that this is consistent with the Government’s own commitment to Operation Enduring Freedom.” This was an alarming response because the British were at that time battling an insurgency in southern Iraq, and the media was full of the torture being committed by British soldier. It was also a confusing response because Operation Enduring Freedom is an operation in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Navy Today also said the Kiwi engineers helped the British construct roadblocks when there was “rioting” down at the port. They were also doing logistics for the UK combat unit. I asked Defence Minister Mark Burton about this but he dodged the questions and waffled on about the engineers’ humanitarian role.

With additional documentation, Hager shows how these Kiwi missions were driven by a Foreign Affairs ministry and Defence Force desire to stay sweet with the Americans by demonstrating some support for their war effort.

Embarrassingly for the Clark government the US was in no doubt that the Kiwi army engineers were part of their occupation force. When, on 16 September 2004, I sought leave “to table the front page of the Coalition Joint Task Force Operation Iraqi Freedom website listing New Zealand as one of the coalition partners” the Labour government denied leave.

Thankfully, the taxi company has now announced they won’t be activating the voice recording capability.  But it does show how we must always be on guard against new technology intruding on our privacy.

One would expect an SOE like NZ Post to be more attuned to privacy issues. Yet, desperate to make a few extra dollars, it sent out a questionnaire to 800,000 customers asking about personal matters, like their favourite magazine, credit card limit and partner’s income. This information was then on-sold to marketers.  The bait to customers was to go into a draw for a big prize.

Thankfully, Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff gave NZ Post a big serve, accusing it of a “systematic, large-scale breach” of privacy principles.

The SOE was far from contrite, justifying its money-grubbing intrusion into our private lives, and only saying that it put its explanation that the survey was “voluntary” in bigger type.

We deserve better.

She is now out of house detention, but the regime closely monitors her movements. On Wednesday she begins a tour around the country, to further test the limits of her freedom. It is a risky enterprise. When she last went on such a tour, in 2003, pro-regime thugs assaulted her convoy and killed around a hundred of her followers.

The regime is under more pressure now. The democratic upsurge in the Middle East has heartened Aung San Suu Kyi – and she has been very supportive of it.

She has long advocated using whatever little freedom she or her people have – and she challenges us in the international community to use whatever freedom we have to support their freedom struggle.

Aung San Suu Kyi continues to be an inspirational figures to the world-wide movement for democracy.

She rightly can’t see why the defendants should not “have their case heard by a jury of their peers.”

The Crimes Act was amended in 2008 to allow a trial to be “judge-only” in certain cases that were “likely to be long and complex”. This was envisaged to apply mainly to complex fraud cases, not long criminal cases like murder, which the public rightly expects to have a jury. It doesn’t appear that Urewera cases, mainly concerned with arms charges, would test a jury’s common sense more than, say, the Bain case.

We can easily see the downside of this case being “judge-only”. Already there is criticism of racial insensitivity in the way Police conducted the October 2007 raids in Tuhoe country, leading to the arrest of those now on trial. Do we really want to risk the judiciary being subject to a similar insensitivity charges, when the trial could be heard by 12 people from all walks of life and probably different cultures?

Fran O’Sullivan notes in her column that “Even Greens MP Keith Locke – who has been the subject of Security Intelligence Service surveillance – has had little (if anything) to say on the court’s decision.” She is right to hurry me up, but I have been slow off the mark for two reasons. It is good for MPs to protect the independence of the courts, and be cautious when commenting on a judgement. And this case has been particularly fraught, because the High Court Judge, Helen Winkelmann, first off suppressed the fact she had even made a judgement, and then suppressed all details of it – other than she wouldn’t allow a jury trial. I have yet to see the Court of Appeal’s reasons for upholding Justice Winkelmann’s decision.

I’m not sure his official speeches are going to spark the same excitement in the community as some of his predecessors. Sir Paul Reeves or Dame Sylvia Cartwright come to mind.

It’s a pity that we still have a party-political recommendation to the Queen regarding who should be the new G-G. The government of the day decides, without any formal process of consultation with other parliamentary parties. The Green Party was not consulted over the appointment of either Sir Anand Satyanand or his successor.

Parliament missed a golden opportunity to make the appointment process more democratic when the Governor-General Bill went through Parliament last year. Prior to the Committee Stages of the Bill I proposed the inclusion of an amendment that the nominee be approved by 75% of Parliament. It shouldn’t be hard for informal consultations to come up with a nomination that would be broadly acceptable, and be assured of a 75% parliamentary majority.

Everyone is suffering trauma of one sort or another. My friend, who was in the Cathedral Café when the rocks came down. My relations with badly damaged houses – who won’t have proper water and sewage for quite a long time.

But it’s not all lows. In the heart of Aranui I saw celebration of community. In one place there was a big fire place on the front lawn, with a pile of wood, where neighbours had been cooking food together. The next door neighbour commented that “it shouldn’t take a disaster to bring us all together”. But together they now are.

Tears came to my eyes last Thursday morning as I watched the Student Volunteer Army mobilize at the university. Hundreds of high-spirited students arriving with their shovels for another solid day attacking the ‘liquifaction’.

It also made me think. The Facebook Generation is making history, not only in the Middle East, but also in our own country. The selfless dedication of the Canterbury students was something to behold, and should inspire us to greater efforts to help the people of Christchurch.

“Mubarak must go now” has been the cry from the streets, but not from the White House – or the Beehive.

When street protests began Hillary Clinton asked Mubarak to bring in ‘reforms’. As the protests grew American officials then called for an orderly handover of power. After the million strong protest on Wednesday Washington is looking for Mubarak to make a quicker exit.

Both President Obama and John Key have been reluctant to see the dictator go. Key told Breakfast TV’s Corin Dann on Monday that he respected that Mubarak had “done his very best to lead a country which has recognised Israel” and had provided “stability and leadership and calmness.” When Corin Dann asked Key if he was “calling for him to go?” the reply was “No”.

Key’s comments are an insult to the 80 million Egyptians to who’ve been under the heel of a ruthless dictatorship for 30 years and are struggling to make ends meet. Mubarak also made life harder for the Palestinians, most recently by working with Israel to stop much needed supplies getting into Gaza. 

The truth is that Western governments have been happy to have dictatorships – like Mubarak’s – running the show in the Middle East, collaborating with Israel and protecting Western oil interests. They are fearful that democratic governments might be more independent and give more support to the Palestinians.

Even the US Embassy in Wellington admits there would be greater concern if the public knew what was really going in its intelligence relations with New Zealand. In one despatch (disclosed by Wikileaks) the US Deputy Chief of Mission David Keegan says that [then] Prime Minister Helen Clark has “been willing to address [intelligence] targets of marginal benefit to New Zealand that could do her political harm if made public.” (2 March 2007).

As I said in my speech in Blenheim at the weekend, it is technically difficult for the New Zealand government to stop the United States using Waihopai to spy on who it wants, because Waihopai is part of a global integrated system – into which the United States puts in whatever key word combinations and phone numbers it wants. As the US Embassy admits in another Wikileaks document, the sending of such intelligence gathered by the GCSB at Waihopai is “automated”. (US Charge d’Affairs David Burnett, 22 September 2005).

A major downside of Waihopai is that the US will be using information gathered at Waihopai for its foreign policy purposes, which are often at odds with New Zealands. If New Zealand wants good relations with all governments in the Asia/Pacific region it isn’t good to be spying on them at the behest of the United States – which is what happens at Waihopai. Thirdly, global spying on international communications is part of a larger privacy problem, whereby huge amounts of personal information is put on databases, and can be used for prejudicial purposes. Just last week British Green MP Caroline Lucas was reported to be on a domestic database of people the UK Police consider dangerous.

“Senior MOD officials (strictly protect) tell us it was not until Finance Minister Michael Cullen pointed out in a subsequent Cabinet meeting that New Zealand’s absence from Iraq might cost NZ dairy conglomerate Fonterra the lucrative dairy contract it enjoyed under the United Nations Oil for Food program, that the prime minister found a face-saving compromise and sent combat engineers in a non-combat role to Basra, where they were embedded with British forces.”

A later US cable dated 22 February 2005 (not yet publicized) claims that “Sending combat engineers to Iraq has enabled the giant New Zealand dairy exporter, Fonterra, to bid on lucrative Iraq-related contracts.”

It may be that the “senior MOD officials” got it wrong about Cullen and the Cabinet discussion. What we do know is that Defence and Foreign Affairs and Trade officials (who work closely together) would have been aware of a link between sending a military  unit to Iraq and obtaining ‘lucrative’ dairy deals. It may well have been a factor in their proposals to Ministers, even though they would probably have avoided explicit trade references in the written papers they submitted.

I believe the main driver behind our army engineers going to Basra was a wish by the Labour government not to get too far off-side with the US and Britain after it had not contributed troops to the invasion.

Sending the army engineers did compromise New Zealand’s opposition to the war. The unit was embedded in a camp of British army engineers, some of whom were directly engaged in combat. Our engineers repaired British military patrol boats, built defensive fortifications and roadblocks for the British, as well as helping them with logistics. So while our unit did help repair schools, it was also engaged in combat-related tasks.

It is misleading to say that the pressure for us to send a military unit came from the UN. America and Britain were strongly pressing nations like New Zealand to send forces to Iraq. They way they saw it, the more countries that had troops on the ground, the more they could justify their occupation of Iraq.

Both the Americans and British were in no doubt that New Zealand was part of their occupation coalition, Operation Iraqi Freedom, as I pointed out in Parliament in 2004.

At the time, the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Iraqi Freedom website pointed out that Britain ‘has several national contingents under its command’ in Multi-National Division (South-East), including “New Zealand”.

It reinforces what we have always suspected, that the Waihopai spy station is used to serve the US government’s purposes, in a way the New Zealand public would object to.

The irony is that Waihopai could now be used to spy on Helen Clark in her new role as head of the UN Development Programme, because other Wikileaks documents disclose an extensive US spying operation on UN officials, including Helen Clark. I don’t think John Key would specifically authorise such spying on his predecessor, but the Waihopai could be intercepting such communications without any New Zealander knowing. New Zealand wouldn’t know the significance of all the phone number or email filters the US puts into the integrated Five Eyes system – which also includes the UK, Canada and Australia.

The Wikileaks documents also show the GCSB has spied on Fiji – either through Waihopai or some other means. I can’t see they would have got anything critical on Commodore Bainimarama. His intentions have not been particularly secret. The greater danger is that Pacific governments get upset at ‘big brother’ New Zealand spying on them. I found this when on a parliamentary delegation to New Caledonia a few years back. We were dressed down by a government leader for using Waihopai to spy on their government’s communications.

The letter says “such calls cannot be dismissed as bluster. Over the last decade, we have seen the normalisation of extrajudicial measures once unthinkable, from ‘extraordinary rendition’ (kidnapping) to ‘enhanced interrogation’ (torture).”

It called for Ms Gillard to “publicly confirm Australia’s commitment to freedom of political communication” and “to provide assistance and advocacy to Mr Assange; and do everything in your power to ensure that any legal proceedings taken against him comply fully with the principles of law and procedural fairness.”

One of the most distasteful things is the way big governments and big corporates are combining to try to shut down Wikileaks. Amazon pushed Wikileaks off its server, PayPal stopped donations, and now Mastercard and Visa have blocked payments to Wikileaks.

Corporate globalisation does not necessarily mean an advance of civilisation if dominant corporations like Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard and Visa can be marshalled by the American superpower to shut down its critics. To protest Amazon’s despicable behaviour people can order their books through other book retailers, but it is hard to avoid Visa and Mastercard because they control most of the New Zealand market.

Wikileaks is becoming the free speech battle of our time, and we all have a stake in how it plays out.

Waihopai’s main task is to intercept global communications for the US National Security Agency (NSA). The Wikileaks documents inform us that the US has been blatantly violating international conventions with its detailed spying on UN figures, from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon down.

The information sought on UN leaders included personal passwords and encryption keys, credit card numbers, and “biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives”. Maybe Waihopai has helped the US get some of these details.

A lot of the information sought was clearly to advance American foreign policy aims, not New Zealand’s. One question posed is why should Waihopai be collecting information for the US on “plans by UN special rapporteurs to press for potentially embarrassing investigations into the US treatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay”, to quote a Guardian summary of US directives contained in the documents.

The Guardian says the “operation targeted at the UN appears to have involved all of Washington’s main intelligence agencies”, presumably including our GCSB’s Big Brother, the NSA. The secret “national human intelligence collection directive” was sent by Hillary Clinton in July 2009 to 33 embassies and consulates, presumably including Wellington. We can assume it was implemented by the US Embassy staff here, particularly those with FBI, CIA and NSA assignments.

A lot of the documents are embarrassing governments, particularly in the Arab world, by showing they were more supportive of US foreign policy than they were admitting to their own people. I wonder if any of the Wikileaks documents shows this also applies in New Zealand? We’ll find out soon enough.

Yesterday I spoke to a gathering of 100 Iraqi Christians who met on the lawn in front of Parliament to mourn those who have been killed. They were particularly upset at the 58 Christians massacred in a Baghdad Catholic church at the beginning of this month. 

There is ongoing persecution of Assyrian Christians who have lived in Iraq since the early Christian period. When the US invaded in 2003 the community numbered around 1 million people, but since then hundreds of thousands have fled the country or been internally displaced. 

Those at the rally yesterday rightly believe our government should be strongly defending the right of Christians to practice their religion freely in Iraq.

Decoding that sentence, it means we should have taken the Greens and community organisations more seriously when they criticised the Bill. The Herald has had reporters at two sets of Select Committee hearings, in 2009 and 2010, where the criticism the Herald is now raising was aired. The Herald is also aware of the nationwide rallies and protest marches since the Labour government introduced the Bill in 2008.

Perhaps what tipped the balance for the Herald was a realisation that the Bill enables the Police, and a range of other state agencies, to raid their offices and seize documents which disclose their sources. This is done through what are called Production Orders, which requires anyone who has material relating to an offence to produce it, or face a sentence of up to a year’s jail.

Also rightly worrying the Herald are Examination Orders, which require people to answer questions about more serious crime, again under threat of jail. This cancels our traditional right to silence. As an example, Tuhoe friends of Tame Iti could be forced to answer questions because the offence Tame is charged with, belonging to an organised criminal group, qualifies for an Examination Order under this Bill.

The Herald rightly says that the Examination and Production Orders, when applied to the media, do matter to the public. “Important revelations of wrongdoing by criminals, business or political leaders and, crucially, investigating authorities themselves are invariably from confidential sources.”

I would advise the Herald to take a closer look at some of the other oppressive provisions in the Bill, like the surveillance warrants that allow Police to place covert cameras inside people’s living rooms for certain offences. For a summary of the problems with the Bill see my Green Party Minority report in the report back to Parliament from the Justice and Electoral Select Committee.

For further information on the Bill go to our search and surveillance webpage

To add insult to injury, Justice Minister Simon Power is now trying to change a law which was used to acquit the Waihopai Three. Yesterday he announced that legislation was being drafted so that people could only use ‘claim of right’ defence to excuse the taking or damaging of property when they believed they have ‘a proprietary or possessory right in the property involved’.

I think it’s quite dangerous to use one court decision to change a centuries-old law. It is important, even if it is hard to get your head around.

Basically, ‘claim of right’ means that even though you technically infringe one law, such as taking or damaging someone else’s property, you can argue you believed, looking at the total picture, that your actions were lawful because:

-        either you genuinely thought it was your property (eg. your bag and another might look the same),

-       or  you thought, even if mistakenly, that other laws came into play (eg: the laws against people being harmed or killed)

The Waihopai Three essentially used the latter part of the ‘claim of right’ defence, that they believed their actions was saving lives in Iraq, and they backed this up with extensive evidence, including from a British intelligence whistleblower, Katherine Gunn.

There are more close-to-home reasons why the Crimes Act does not restrict the ‘claim of right’ defence to cases to the taking or damaging of property which people may believe, mistakenly, that they personally own.

People might smash a door down to help someone in distress, or remove someone’s car to stop them driving home drunk. There are all sorts of occasions where the property affected might not be one’s own.

A ‘claim of right’ defence may be appropriate in such situations, even where some other defences may also be available.

Norway has used its good offices, and specialist advisers, to sponsor peace talks in Sri Lanka, Sudan, the Middle East, and the Philippines.

It has been able to play this mediating role because it has not declared any of the parties to the talks as terrorist organisations.

Norway has had mixed success. In the Sudan progress was made because the big Western powers also engaged with the peace process, and this year there will be a referendum on independence in southern Sudan. The peace talks in Sri Lanka broke down, mainly because instead of engaging the US, Britain, Australia and the EU sided with one party, the Sri Lankan government, and declared the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organisation. Around 30,000 Sri Lankans died in the war that followed.

Since Benigno Aquino assumed the Philippine presidency in June there have been hopes for a resumption of stalled peace negotiations between the government and the leftist National Democratic Front, hosted by Norway.

These are made more difficult by the US declaring the two main components of the NDF, the Communist Party of the Philippines and New People’s Army, to be terrorist organisations.

Yesterday John Key followed suit, putting these two organisations on New Zealand’s terrorist list.

He also put six other organisations on the list, including the military wings of Hamas and Hizbollah. This is plain silly, when surely the main task of countries like New Zealand is to encourage peace negotiations between Israel and the governments in Gaza (Hamas) and Lebanon (where the government includes Hizbollah ministers).

In his statement yesterday John Key said that “All seven of the entities [designated] have carried out various terrorist acts, including the indiscriminate killing of civilians.”

Yes, in the conflict in the Middle East and the Philippines many civilians have been killed, but both sides have been to blame. In fact, if you read the reports of Amnesty International and other human rights agencies, the governments of Israel and The Philippines have been responsible for most of the ‘indiscriminate killing of civilians”.

We need peace talks to solve these conflicts, not countries like New Zealand defining one side as the ‘terrorists’ and encouraging a military solution.

The total damages claim against the three protesters is over $1 million.

The court case will be micky mouse. The GCSB will outline its case in solemn tomes. Then, asked about the purpose of their dome, the GCSB will say: “can’t tell you, it’s secret”. That is, if they send any witnesses to the court, which they didn’t do in the first court case, when the three men got off a charge of “intentional damage”.

The “not guilty” verdict was not surprising after evidence to the court from whistle-blower Katherine Gunn. In 2003, while working at the British equivalent of the GCSB, she came across memo from the US National Security Agency (NSA) calling for the worldwide interception of communications of Security Council members to get ‘insights’ into where they stood on UN resolutions authorising an invasion of Iraq. The Waihopai station, as part of the integrated system run by the NSA, would have taken part in these interceptions, even though the Clark government was opposing any such invasion.

Some New Zealanders, like Waikato lecturer Ron Smith who I debated on Morning Report on Thursday, think it is great that we are helping America gather electronic intelligence. But there are many other Kiwis who would like us to take a more independent stance.

One cover story for Waihopai, which came up during the Morning Report debate, is that it is some version of Interpol specialising in tracking down terrorists. In reality the five-nation Echelon network, of which Waihopai is a part, is tasked with spying on other governments. Nicky Hager provided chapter and verse in his book Secret Power (1996) that GCSB analysts were focussing on Japanese government communications. Fourteen years later the target is probably China.

The Waihopai Three protesters say they are not scared of another court case because it will give them another platform to talk about the base and explain why it should not be on our soil.

Late last year, the Pork Industry Board threatened litigation to prevent the Government from releasing a draft code for animal welfare in piggeries for public consultation.

Last week, a leaked email from the Pork Industry Board revealed it was conspiring with pig farmers to evade the Official Information Act over its audit of animal welfare in New Zealand piggeries.

Today, the Sunday Star-Times has revealed that the Pork Industry Board is also likely responsible for covert surveillance of animal welfare activists, including the (not very) covert use of a tracking device on the vehicle of one animal welfare activist.

The Pork Industry Board is a statutory agency gone feral. It appears to be assuming it has surveillance powers that even the Police and the SIS don’t have. The Police and the SIS need to obtain warrants to use tracking devices on vehicles. For the Pork Industry Board to be able to do so without a warrant is outrageous.

The law is unclear as to whether such surveillance is lawful. But it should not be, and Keith Locke has today suggested that this should be addressed by an amendment to the Search and Surveillance Bill currently before Parliament’s Justice and Electoral Select Committee. Well done, Keith!

But looking at the bigger picture, the Pork Industry Board is a statutory agency that considers itself above the law in several respects. Agriculture Minister David Carter is either unable or unwilling to make it accountable.

The Pork Industry Board has three strikes against it now. Surely it is time for a Commission of Inquiry into its attempts on behalf of rogue farmers to subvert the process of requiring piggery owners to maintain humane conditions for their animals.