By Lloyd Burr
The Maori Party has ruled out supporting the National Government’s urgent legislation which will suspend the Supreme Court’s Urewera terror decision which has made covert police cameras illegal.
Prime Minister John Key announced yesterday that “almost all use of covert video surveillance by the police is now rendered unlawful” after the Urewera 13 were let go by the Supreme Court last week because the police obtained video evidence illegally.
National will take a piece of legislation to Parliament next week that temporarily suspends the decision and reinstates secret filming by the police.
But the Maori Party, one of National’s confidence and supply partners, has condemned the move, calling it a “panic reaction” and “adding fuel to the fire”.
Maori Party MP Te Ururoa Flavell says there is “no way the Maori Party will support after-the-fact legislative change to make the unlawful lawful…Two wrongs do not a right make”.
"It appears that what the National Government will ask us to do, is to suspend the law temporarily - to condone the unlawful act by the police and then to add fuel to the fire by introducing legislation to make the unlawful lawful.
"What sort of justice system do we have if the upholder of the law is allowed to break the law and get away with it?
"The facts of this matter seem unequivocal - the court has decided that the use of video surveillance is unlawful in the absence of prior judicial authorisation.
“Because there was no legislative authority, the police should not have acted the way they did,” he says.
But Attorney-General Chris Finlayson says the legislation will just “freeze the law” so police could “use covert video evidence in about 50 ongoing investigations”.
“We're not interfering with presumptions of innocence,” he told Radio New Zealand. “What we're saying is that we're freezing law at a particular time for a particular period so that Parliament can look at this very serious issue in the context of the search and surveillance legislation.”
Mr Key said yesterday that he wants support from as many other parties as he can but the Maori Party have made their intentions clear.
“The Maori Party will be carefully scrutinising the Court of Appeal decision and the associated cabinet papers to understand the full impact of this rushed decision in response to the Operation 18 fiasco,” Mr Flavell says.
"We want justice for the people of Tuhoe who are still left out in the cold by this latest turn of events.
"Have the people of Te Urewera not suffered enough? When will they receive the apology and the recognition due to them, that unlawful police investigations were allowed to proceed, unabated, causing significant trauma to children, to families, to the small community of the Ruatoki valley?"
"We believe that justice can only be done when it is seen to be done,” he says.
Mr Key said if he doesn’t get the numbers to support the legislation, there would be some “very serious criminals who would walk free”.
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