2023 was of course an election year, and it was an election campaign that civil liberties issues did not feature in much. However it seems that we now have a new government that has made a number of promises around changes to law enforcement, many of which have implications for both justice and civil liberties.

Issues and Events in NZ

Technology and surveillance

We definitely recommend keeping an eye on how the Office of the Privacy Commissioner is going with their investigation of whether to bring in a privacy code to control the use of biometrics including facial recognition. We have participated and have strongly supported clarifying how New Zealand’s current Privacy Act applies to the use of facial recognition technology.

A closely related issue has been the increasing use by the NZ Police of a number of potentially problematic technologies, often in partnership with private companies. This includes the investigation of facial recognition technology, the regular and normalised access by police to privately owned systems that record car number plates (ANPR), and looking at AI based analysis and decision making.

Open Government Partnership

The government’s level of commitment and engagement with the Open Government Partnership was a source of great disappointment, with very little being achieved. The Council put in a significant amount of effort engaging both government and other civil society groups, and it was quite dispiriting to see how the government failed on its commitment to both co-creation and open government.

One bright spot was that we helped organise a very successful Strengthening Democracy through Open Government event which featured former PM Helen Clark, and the Chief Executive of the OGP Sanjay Pradhan, Helmut Modlik the CEO of Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira, our own Deputy Chair Andrew Ecclestone, and former chair of Transparency International NZ Suzanne Snively.

Actions of the Council

Some of the activities the Council was involved in this year include:

• Arranged a seminar by VUW academic Dr Luke Fitzmaurice-Brown to talk about Te Tiriti o Waitangi, civil liberties, and constitutional change.
• Made a number of complaints to the Ombudsman about government departments and ministers failing to live up to their responsibilities under the Official Information Act.
• Used our Mastodon account @civillibertynz@mastodon.social to push our views, events and publications. Please follow us if you don’t already.
• Appeared in the media discussing a wide range of topics over the year.
• Worked with Amnesty International and Just Speak to continue supporting Aotearoa Justice Watch, to provide a way for people to report problems they experience in our policing and justice systems.

Social functions

We have had a number of successful social functions at the Southern Cross Bar in Wellington to discuss the issues of the day. It’s been good to meet some of the members, and I hope to see some of you there in 2024.

Victoria University of Wellington Law School Essay prize

We are pleased to announce the establishment of an annual $1000 prize for the best essay about civil liberties by a student at VUW Law School. We hope this will stimulate law students to learn more about civil liberties and the law, and we look forward to announcing the first winner in 2024.

Submissions

We made numerous submissions on the following bills and other matters (all submissions are available on our website):

• Review of Standing Orders 2023 in which we made substantive recommendations for how Select Committees should handle public submissions, and recommended ways to strengthen the Attorney General’s Bill of Rights checks.
• Criminal Activity Intervention Legislation Bill in which we oppose the significant widening of search warrant powers by granting geographical multi-use search warrants, and the imposition of new forms of control over people just by asserting they’re part of a gang. 
• Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Amendment Bill in which we strongly oppose any form of criminal confiscation where someone has not been convicted of a related crime. The government’s proposals are merely a form of legalised theft based on suspicion.
• National Security Strategy where we argued that protecting civil liberties is one of the best ways to protect our personal security, and that these liberties should not be sacrificed for secondary goals. We also argued that increased surveillance reduces liberty and security, and that to feel safe from our own government we need better and more transparent oversight of our Police and intelligence services.
• Inspector-General of Defence Bill – a very disappointing bill that seems designed to avoid proper oversight of the NZ Defence Force, while containing some very worrying abilities to ban the publishing of information embarrassing to the NZ Defence Force. This was significantly improved by the Select Committee but then weakened again by Minister Andrew Little.
• Local Government Official Information and Meetings (Amendment) Bill – yet another attempt by the government to add even more secrecy clauses in a Bill that’s ostensibly about improving LIM reports.
• Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill – a poorly conceived bill that takes the worst of the current law and adds ‘religious belief’ to it. This was abandoned and the issue has been sent to the Law Commission for a later government to look at.
• We were very disappointed to see New Zealand going back on international law and our own Bill of Rights by enabling mass detention of asylum seekers in the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill, a law being made for a situation which hasn’t even happened.
• While we don’t have an opinion on artist’s resale rights, we were concerned that the Resale Right for Visual Artists Bill enables a body to be appointed to do a government function without being subject to the Official Information Act, Public Records Act, and Public Audit Act. We’re pleased to say that the final version of the law fixed this.
• The Severe Weather Emergency Recovery Legislation Bill is yet another example of the government rushing through emergency bills with sweeping powers, but little time to respond.
• Our submission to the DIA’s discussion paper about content regulation said that at best it’ll be ineffectual and at worst harmful to freedom of expression. We also didn’t see the need to reform the arrangements for newspapers, radio and television in a proposal mainly aimed at online content.
• We responded to the Law Commission’s issues paper on preventative detention. While we’re still opposed to it in principle, we recognise that it might be a necessary evil in our current system and we support the need to reform it to more closely align it with justice and civil liberties.
• Strong support for the Electoral (Lowering Voting Age for Local Elections and Polls) Legislation Bill. We support lowering the voting age to 16 for both local and national elections, and while this Bill only does the first it’s still a good start.
• We opposed the Ram Raid Offending and Related Measures Amendment Bill as being an unreasonable extension of criminal responsibility to 12-13 year old children, counter to both international agreements and our Bill of Rights.

Internal Council matters

Exec Committee renewal

The Exec Committee is the core of the Council’s efforts. We’ve been working well together meeting every month to discuss events and make plans. However it seems likely that one or two members will not be standing for re-election so I’d like to ask you to consider whether it’s time for you to step up to defend civil liberties in New Zealand.

You’ll be committing to one online meeting per month, plus you’ll be given opportunities to work on submissions, articles, and interacting with other organisations. We all had to start somewhere and are happy to help get others up to speed. Email Thomas at thomas@nzccl.org.nz.

Communications

Our website at nzccl.org.nz is still the core of our communications efforts, with all of our material published there.

We have also given up on our use of Twitter/X as it seems to be failing and falling to extremism. We now maintain our main social media presence on Mastodon at @civillibertynz@mastodon.social and also have established a presence on LinkedIn.

We hope you have found our quarterly email newsletters interesting. We know that some people weren’t receiving them properly but we have recently fixed a few technical issues that should help, otherwise check your spam folders.

Plans for the future

With a new government it will be interesting to see what 2024 brings. 

• Freedom of expression is still an issue, although it seems likely that the changes to hate speech laws have been postponed indefinitely. The DIA has pushed on with their review of media regulation but it remains to be seen whether the new government will pick up on it.
• The new government has promised to crack down on gangs and crime, both of which are often used as an excuse to override our civil liberties. 
• The rise of AI – artificial intelligence – is a threat to government accountability and transparency. The technology is still very new with many shortcomings, but companies and governments are rushing into using it, not least because it gives them another way to blame “the computer” for decisions.
• And increased digital surveillance is still a worry, especially with influential countries like the UK trying to put an end to online privacy by demanding access to encrypted communications.

We will continue with the work we have been doing. However there is always room for improvement and, of course, we could always do with more help. Please contact me at thomas@nzccl.org.nz if you can contribute on one or more of our issues. 

Regards, 

Thomas Beagle 

Chairperson, NZ Council for Civil Liberties