Cafes and convictions

Here in Wellington we are counting the days to the next local body elections. Incumbent mayor Kerry Prendergast is campaigning on her vision of the city which seems to involve cafes, aimless motorway extensions and visits by celebrity sports men - a sort of lifestyle magazine editor's vision of a city really. The readers of one such magazine apparently recently voted our fair city 12th in a survey of global "liveability". One wonders whether the readers of that magazine where told about our city's bullying liqour ban which is criminalising a significant number of the city's ratepayers. Anyone crossing into a designated section of the CBD with a container of alcohol whether in a car or on foot is liable to a criminal conviction being entered against their names along with a maximum fine of $20000. No disorder or drunkeness is required to offend the bylaw. Simple possession of alcohol is enough. The mayor and the police say that officers warn people before arresting. If that's the message then it is not getting through to the officers responsible for enforcing the law. I have seven clients at the moment who are charged with this offence none of whom have been warned before spending up to a night in the cells and being put at risk of conviction. The police will also say that they have to deal with offences involving alcohol in the central city (particularly violence) far too often. I don't doubt them but we should be addressing these substantive crimes and encouraging the people who commit them to examine their use or abuse of alcohol. Criminalising behaviour which is at best part and parcel of the modern urban experience and at worst poor manners is not good civic policy or the mark of a great city.

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.