Welcome Mr Zaoui

The withdrawal of the security risk certificate is the end of a disgracefully long process for Ahmed Zaoui who has had to wait for more than four years for his status in New Zealand to be finally determined. It’s a tribute to his supporters and his legal team rather than a vindication of an obscure judicial and bureaucratic process. For me the turning point was the bail hearing in the Supreme Court in 2004 where the Court was concerned with the question of what type of detention was proportionate to the risk represented by Mr Zaoui. The furthest the then Solicitor-General could go was that Mr Zaoui knew some people who were probably terrorists. That was it. The fear was not that he would be trawling the back streets of Auckland for plastic explosive but that he knew some bad people. Probably inevitable given his opposition to the Algerian regime that he had come across people who, like him, were opposed to a brutal government but who differed with him about how that opposition should be expressed. Probably also inevitable that some people opposed to the Algerian regime want to fight fire with fire and use violence to achieve their ends. The idea that we should trust in the authorities in relation to Mr Zaoui was exploded at the point of the Supreme Court bail hearing. This was all the State had, this was the basis of Mr Zaoui's detention in solitary confinement for a year and this was how the State wanted to finally determine Mr Zaoui’s fate – by keeping the detail of the case against him behind a veil and by attempting to divine the truth without rebuttal from the person in the best position to do so. There is no substitute in a fair judicial process for knowing the case against you and the involvement of the SIS shouldn’t change that.