Academic and Lawyer Accuses Government of Scaremongering and Showing Contempt for Democracy

The government has been accused of fabricating an increased risk to New Zealand security to justify new invasive powers in the Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill. And its decision to allow just 48 hours for public submissions on the Bill has been called contemptuous of the democratic process.

These accusations were made by academic and lawyer, David Small. Dr Small was the first person to lay a complaint against the SIS with the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. The Inspector-General ruled that no law had been broken but a subsequent court case ruled that an interception warrant convey no implicit authority for the SIS to enter private property for the purposes of that warrant. The new Bill proposes that the SIS now be given the right to enter private property even without a warrant.

Dr Small has rejected claims in the Bill that New Zealand’s risk level has recently increased, pointing to eight year-old documents from the SIS and New Zealand’s Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism that express the country’s risk in exactly the same terms as what are claimed to be new higher levels of risk.

He says that there is no justification for expanding the powers of intelligence and surveillance organisations, especially not given the history of agencies and politicians to whom they are supposed to account failing to exercise their powers responsibly.

Further detail is available at http://axesofjustice.blogspot.co.nz/2014/11/terrorist-fighters-bill-unjustified.html

David Small is a lawyer and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury. One of his areas of research is the balance between national security and civil liberties. In 2011, he was Fulbright Senior Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center studying alternative approaches to anti-terrorism for low-risk countries. He has have made submissions on virtually every piece of legislation im

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