The Oath (Affirmation) I took was to the Head of State of my country.  I solemnly, sincerely and truly declared to be:

“…faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors according to law.”

Thirteen years ago, on becoming Director of a UNU agency, I took the UN Oath of Loyalty:

“I solemnly affirm to exercise in all loyalty, discretion and conscience the functions entrusted to me as a member of the international service of the United Nations, to discharge those functions and regulate my conduct with the interests of the United Nations only in view, and not to seek or accept instructions in respect to the performance of my duties from any government or other authority external to the Organization.”

As a result, from 1999 to 2004 I was working as a New Zealander for the global interest as expressed, imperfectly but legitimately, through the decisions of the United Nations, and sworn not to accept instructions from the NZ Government.  As a NZ citizen (stationed in the Middle East, Europe or New York), I could vote for a political party which might form a NZ government, but not to accord it ‘loyalty’.

Today as a member of the NZ Parliament, where is my loyalty to lie?  What is the relationship between the two oaths?  Are they intrinsically compatible or incompatible?  As a student in Boston in the ‘70s, I did my master’s thesis on this question (Values in Paradox: Loyalty and the International Civil Service; Fletcher School of law & Diplomacy, 1974).

As a result of the parliamentary oath my loyalty is to the state of New Zealand, as represented by its Head of State. Is it to the NZ Government, as led by the Prime Minister? I am free to oppose his Government’s policies in parliamentary debate as a member of the loyal opposition. But am I bound to accept instructions from his Government?

The answer is in the phrase ‘according to law’.  In the 21^st century, law is composed of domestic and international law.

In domestic law, I am bound by the laws adopted by the Parliament of which I am a member, even though I may have voted against them.

But then there is international law, which is binding on New Zealand. The UN Charter forbids aggression by a Member State. Non-aggression is regarded as ius cogens – an obligation so fundamental to humanity as to be non-derogable and binding towards all (erga omnes).

Throughout my adult life I have perceived the global interest as being paramount and the national interest as being legitimate provided it is compatible with the global interest – see my 1999 book The Planetary Interest (UCL Press, London; ed.).

In this paradigm, there is no conflict between the NZ parliamentary oath and the UN oath.

But if a NZ government were, say, to break the UN Charter and commit aggression, then it follows that my loyalty to the global interest would over-ride my loyalty to New Zealand in the specific case of a particular decision by the Government.

In the event that the UN itself failed to make a ‘decision’ on such a matter (such as a veto in the Security Council) I would consult international legal authorities and follow my conscience.

Either way, the (legitimate) national interest would remain compatible with the global interest. I would be remaining true to New Zealand by attributing a higher loyalty to the United Nations Charter than to a NZ government decision, which I would regard as null and void, and not binding upon me.

Labour says:

[the Act]…allows the Government by Order in Council to terminate people’s Internet access for up to 6 months. Labour opposed that part of the law when it was being discussed. National appears to be taking a different position at home from its position overseas.

If only that were true. Labour voted for National’s legislation. But worse, they actually voted against my amendment to remove internet termination from the Bill.

Labour’s tech spokesperson Claire Curran argued previously this was OK because a ‘compromise’ was reached in Select Committee to leave enacting termination up to the Minister of Commerce.

Ms Street received a number of Tweets pointing out her inconsistency, and she responded:

It would have been great to get Labour’s support for my amendment. But given that they voted for internet termination, I do think it is a bit rich for them to critisise the Government  for taking ‘a different position at home from its position overseas’. Labour should agree on its own position?

The “international community” should get moving now, because the Sri Lankan government has already dismissed the report out of hand. It is embarrassed that the Panel blames the Sri Lankan army for most of the “tens of thousands” of deaths in the last months of the war.  The Sri Lankan army encouraged Tamil civilians to move into “no-fire zones” and then shelled and bombed them. The Panel also condemns the government for shelling hospitals, blocking humanitarian assistance, and violating the rights of Internally Displaced Persons, LTTE cadres, the media, and critics of government policy. The Tamil Tigers were also condemned for preventing civilians from escaping the conflict zone, and suicide attacks which killed civilians.

Getting a full international investigation won’t be easy, because countries like China will try to block any further UN action. The European Parliament’s compromise resolution makes some good points but essentially leaves it up to the Sri Lankan government to investigate further and implement the Panel’s recommendations.

However, we can’t afford to let the matter lie. As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights  Navi Pillay said “The way this conflict was conducted, under the guise of fighting terrorism, challenged the very foundations of the rules of war and cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.”

We can’t just sit on the sidelines as the Thai rulers – who have no electoral mandate – resort to greater force to repel a massive movement of the urban and rural poor.

Our government may have had good relations with the Thai elite – including a free trade agreement – but that is no excuse for keeping quiet.

Our higher duty is to the Thai people who might be slaughtered in their thousands if the situation continues to deteriorates.

We should say: bring in the UN now to help chart a course to new elections and a Thai government which has the confidence of the people.

 Phil’s notice of motion asked the House to support three things;

Recognise the historic opportunity to advance the cause of nuclear disarmament at the NPT Review Conference currently underway. 

Recognise the leadership on this issue by US President Obama; and

Call on the NZ Govt to take an active role on this issue, drawing on our proud nuclear-free stance, and support the UN’s Five-Point Plan, including preparation for a Nuclear Weapon Convention.

These are all laudable aims however there is a tendency by some in New Zealand to over-advertise our credentials over nuclear disarmament

New Zealand was indeed path-breaking in the 1980s over our national nuclear-free zone, which went beyond the Latin American and South Pacific regional zones in banning nuclear-capable ships from our national waters.

I was, and remain, a supporter of that policy – I did my PhD on the subject and was part of the NZ delegation that negotiated the South Pacific zone.  But there has always been a distinction between the strict nuclear-free policy here in our national territory and the ambivalent stance we take at the UN to a nuclear-free world.  To this day we still vote along political rather than logical lines on nuclear disarmament at the UN.

Successive NZ Governments, under both National and Labour, have been ambivalent in their voting patterns at the United Nations on resolutions calling for a nuclear-free world. 

They have on occasion voted in lock-step with NATO countries in opposing some resolutions calling for various aspects of a nuclear-free world, depending on which countries are sponsoring it.

NATO relies on nuclear deterrence to “keep the peace” and foresees retention of nuclear weapons “into the indefinite future”. 

New Zealand, by contrast, is on record as being in favour of a nuclear-free world.  Yet both National and Labour often vote with NATO at the UN in the mistaken belief that Kiwis back home do not notice.

In fact, we do.

The issue most covered was the Committee’s recommendation that our government ‘should consider relinquishing the use of Tasers’ because of the ‘severe pain’ and injuries they cause. I was quoted in the media as saying that we ‘should take heed of this esteemed international body’ but Police Minister Judith Collins simply joined in the Police Association’s bashing of the UN Committee. It was good to see the Maori Party back the UN Committee on Tasers in Parliament yesterday. Half of the Kiwis tasered have been Maori.

Prime TV picked up another Committee recommendation and interviewed me on the Committee’s criticism of the weak status of our Bill of Rights Act 1990 (BORA), and the way laws pass through our Parliament even when the Attorney-General says they are not consistent with the Act. Just this month Paula Bennett’s Social Assistance bill received a negative Bill of Rights audit from the Attorney-General for its discrimination against certain categories of beneficiaries, like those on the DPB. But the Bill has just gone through Parliament in urgency, with its discriminatory provisions unaddressed.

If you want a fuller picture of the UN Committee’s critique of our human rights record you can go directly to the report.

The Green Party welcomes the Committee’s suggestions to improve the lot of asylum seekers – namely that they should not be detained with convicted prisoners, or sent to supposedly ‘safe third countries’ from where they could be returned to their persecutors. The UN Committee is helping redress the balance in favour of asylum seekers, who are often treated as political football in this country.

“The Terrorism Suppression Act has rightly come in for a bit of stick, because it lacks a provision to challenge terrorist designations. The committee is also on the mark in asking if rights were violated in the October 2007 ‘anti-terrorism’ raids and why there has been such a huge delay in any resulting trial.

“The Committee also makes pertinent comments on the need to address low participation of women in high-level business positions, and ‘the over-representation of Maori, in particular Maori women, in prisons’.

All in all, it is a good morale boost for the Green Party on some key issues we’ve been challenging National and Labour governments for some years.

Doesn’t the Government know that NZSL is the third national language along with Te Reo and English? What is the Deaf Community supposed to make of this sabotage?

Apparently people in the Manawatu Region were told to buy the DVD.

The suggestion that you can learn to sign language from a DVD sounds  reasonable at first glance, but a very smart colleague of mine who is part of the Deaf Community just tried this learning method and she said it was very difficult and unsatisfactory.

Cutting out the NZSL teachers in any part of the country is disastrous for the future of the language but also for the human rights of children and adults who need to sign. NoRightTurn calls the decision ‘simply evil’.

Where else might this have happened and who else is missing out? What about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities?

It is a sign of the times and it’s not good enough!

Perhaps some insight into how the IPCC works will put a few minds at rest:

From http://blogs.abc.net.au/events/2009/11/conspiracies-and-the-ipcc.html (emphasis added)

While it is called a ‘panel,’ the IPCC is actually one of the most ambitious scientific undertakings in history bringing together hundreds of scientists and other experts who are generally nominated by their governments or by non-government organisations (such as the Australian Academy of Science or the CSIRO). But the IPCC is also policy-neutral. Its job is to present the best science. There is not a single policy recommendation in its reports.

A different group of scientists is picked for each report and it is not just climate scientists – but biologists, physicists, geologists, economists, engineers, health experts and so on. Each report deals with three categories: the physical science, or how climate change works; impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, or how to deal with it; and mitigation, or how to minimise it.

Each of these working groups is headed by two scientists, one each from a developed and developing nation, supported by up to 500 other scientists known as lead authors who in turn are supported by up to 2000 further expert reviewers. Together they evaluate thousands of pieces of peer-reviewed research from around the globe.

Here is how Queensland University’s Professor Ove Heogh-Guldberg, a world expert on coral reefs and climate change, describes what happened when he contributed a small slice of the 2007 IPCC report:

“The IPCC has one of the most rigorous review processes I have ever experienced. There are various stages of review. The first round involves the working groups picking over the text (hundreds of eyes and opinions). If you have been involved in this process, it is a quite an experience taking months and years – involving a lot of pedantic haggling over detail – but always using the peer-reviewed literature as the base.
“When this is complete, then the documents are sent to signatory governments for review. Leading scientists from each of the countries pick over the details. And after this, the documents are placed for open comment (on the web). At this point, any government, industry, science group, special interest group, or individual is invited for comment, recommendations, amendments etc. At each of these points, the lead and contributing authors are required to respond to each comment or suggestion in a precise fashion, however correct or off-the-wall they may be.

“The responses from the specialists are independently reviewed to ensure that the documents have been amended or the comment/suggestion/objection refuted scientifically (i.e. with peer-reviewed literature). I had to respond to 87 comments on a relatively small contribution to the Australian and NZ chapters within working group 2 of the IPCC report in 2007. At the end of the day, I don’t think you could have a more rigorous process. The only problem is that it ends up being conservative (e.g. failure to predict the dramatic decline of Arctic sea ice). That may be its only flaw.”

There were more than 30,000 comments from the open public review process for just one of the 2007 working groups – all of them given a written response that is publicly available.

One of the lead authors on the 2001 and 2007 reports, UNSW’s Professor Andy Pitman, also worries it is unduly cautious especially because in the final stages all governments, including those with vested interests in fossil fuels like Saudi Arabia, have to approve what has been written “line by line.”

A lot has changed in the last three years. The picture is becoming clearer and clearer, and it’s not pretty.

pundit.co.nz has an excellent summary, and here are a few tidbits

Scientists believe that our greenhouse gas emissions to date have already committed the world to average warming of 2.4 degrees celsius – surpassing the two degrees previously identified as a dangerous risk.

The IPCC’s worst-case emissions scenarios have been exceeded. Man-made emissions have risen 38 percent above 1990 levels. They rose on average 3.5 percent per year for the period 2000-2007, an almost four-fold increase on the previous decade’s average of 0.9 percent per year.

The Arctic could be ice free in summer within 20 years, not the waning years of this century as had previously been thought.

A plausible range for global average sea level rise of 0.5 to 2.0 metres by 2100 is suggested, due to thermal expansion and ice melt – much more than the upper limit of 59 centimetres previously predicted by the IPCC.

Modelling shows that a 50 centimetre rise would produce tidal events every day that now occur once a year, and events expected once during the whole of the 20th century will occur several times every year by 2100.

This is pretty stark. Although it’s not surprising that the official IPCC reports have turned out to be very conservative, when every single line has to be agreed upon by so many people. Naturally, only the most common-denominator science is allowed through.

What do you reckon it take for Nick Smith to get real about this issue? If not this, what will?

“Climate change threatens all our goals for development and social progress,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the world’s business and government leaders today at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. “On the other hand, it also presents us with a gilt-edged opportunity.”

Ban’s comments came as the World Economic Forum released a report warning that unless at least US$515 billion a year is invested in clean energy between now and 2030, carbon emissions will reach a level considered unsustainable by scientists, causing global temperatures to rise by two degrees Celsius.

“Green Investing: Towards a Clean Energy Infrastructure” identifies eight emerging, large-scale clean energy sectors critical to the clean energy infrastructure of the future – onshore wind, offshore wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal electricity generation, municipal solar waste-to-energy, sugar-based ethanol, cellulosic and next generation biofuels, and geothermal power.

Ban urged the high-powered audience to use the current economic crisis to launch a global Green New Deal that creates jobs and fights climate change by investing in renewable energy and technological development.

“By tackling climate change head-on we can solve many of our current troubles, including the threat of global recession,” said Secretary-General Ban. “We stand at a crossroads. It is important that we realize we have a choice. We can choose short-sighted unilateralism and business as usual. Or we can grasp global cooperation and partnership on a scale never before seen.”

The document is not legally binding in the way a treaty is, but it does formally define what is meant by fundamental freedoms and human rights in the legal sense when those terms are used in other treaties and the United Nations Charter.

In his press release yesterday, Keith Locke points out a couple of instances where NZ doesn’t live up to the declaration, even after 60 years:

For example, the Immigration Bill, currently before Parliament, does not provide all new migrants the fair public hearing provided for in Article 10 of the Universal Declaration. Evidence against the migrants can be kept secret from them.

Our immigration criteria are biased against non-English speakers contrary to the anti-discrimination provision in Article 2 of the Declaration.

Despite adopting the Declaration, the United States violated or falsely reinterpreted multiple principles in order to execute the occupation of Iraq and the building of Guantanamo Bay, a situation that President-elect Obama promises to rectify as soon as he is sworn in.

It is clear that human rights are something that we have to work on continuously and never take for granted, even in our supposedley mature democracies. It is a living document that should be celebrated and enforced to the best of our ability.