NZ Council for Civil Liberties

Submission: Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill

28th April 2026

About the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties

  1. The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties (‘the Council’) is a voluntary, not-for-profit organisation founded in 1952 which advocates to promote human rights and maintain civil liberties.
  2. We wish to make an oral submission to the Committee.

Introduction

  1. Aotearoa New Zealand is a settler colony. All Tangata Tiriti are immigrants. Closing the door behind us is unjust. And doing so without consulting Tangata Whenua is hypocritical.
  2. Civil liberties are under threat around the world. “Immigration enforcement” is being used overseas as a pretext for incarcerating people who have committed no offence. Given this context, we should amend our Immigration Act to prevent similar overreach from occurring here.
  3. Instead this bill does the opposite. It removes key safeguards. It empowers immigration officers to demand identification papers from everyone, with only a “good cause” threshold, and anyone who fails to comply, citizen or not, will be arrested.
  4. The Council strongly objects to this bill, and asks the Committee to reject it.

Recommendation 1

Reject the entire bill.

Amendment Paper

  1. This bill is bad law resulting from bad law making. This bill is peculiar in that an amendment paper was filed before the bill was sent to the Select Committee. Further, that amendment paper is also poor quality, in that it does not include actual amendments, merely vague “proposals”.

Recommendation 2

Get an updated BORA report once we have the amendments written into the bill.

Recommendation 3

Get an updated Regulatory Impact Statement once we have the amendments written into the bill.

Immigration Police

  1. One of our country’s strengths is our unitary police force. We avoid jurisdictional overlaps and other inefficiencies which inevitably develop in countries with multiple police forces. When we allow other agencies to deploy enforcement officers, we dilute this benefit while running many risks.1
  2. This bill strengthens the powers of Immigration Compliance and Investigation (ICI), part of New Zealand Immigration. The RIS suggests that ICI funding will need to expand after this bill.
  3. The Council believes that the time has come to end “immigration police” within our borders. This will take sweeping changes to parts 8 and 9 of the Immigration Act.
  4. These changes will take time, and there is an urgent need to act. Immediately, the Committee can recommend changing enforcement from a “good cause to suspect” standard to a “reason to believe” standard.

Recommendation 4
Replace “good cause” with “reason to believe” in sections
114, 149(1)(d), 274, 277A(1), 279, 279A(1)(c), 280(1), 281A(1)(b), 288,  and 289(2)(a).
And in clause 32 replace “suspects” with “has reason to believe.”

Arbitrary Arrest and detention

  1. Prior to this bill, people were free to move about as they pleased. Clause 26 of this bill requires everyone to carry identification at all times, and to surrender that identification to ICI officers. People who fail to do so may be detained under new section 280(4)(b).
  2. It’s unclear what the penalties are for failure to comply with section 280. The bill reproduces the act’s 280(2)(b):” warn the person that if the person fails without reasonable excuse to comply with his or her request, the person is liable to arrest and detention under this Act.” Section 355(5) establishes a maximum penalty of a $5,000 fine for non-specific failures to comply with the act. As written, ICI must warn people that they are subject to arrest, however all that they can actually do is issue a fine. Whatever Parliament’s intent the wording should be clarified.
  3. Failure to carry identification would set a new low for seriousness of an offence. The Council would therefore recommend establishing a new, lesser penalty. 

Recommendation 5
Add subsection 4B to section 355
“A person convicted of an offence against section 344(a),(b),(e), or (f) is liable to a fine not exceeding $10.”

  1. People who are detained by ICI but who are not actually in violation of their visa conditions, typically because they are residents, should be entitled to compensation.

Freedom of Expression

Lack of transparency

  1. First, we note the Department’s confession that they “do not have evidence for how often section 280 powers are currently used – this information is not currently recorded.”2 Which is to say that our government is once again happy to expand limits on our BORA section 14 right to freedom of expression, while not holding itself to that section. Nor to the Public Records Act. Nor, for that matter, to the evidence based decision making it claims to hold dear.
  2. Given ICI’s confession to negligent record keeping, the Council will stoop to repeating rumors: namely that ICI is already making widespread use of section 280 to harass people who “look foreign”. If true, this should cause several concerns, the biggest of which would be the ICI ascribe to the false, racist narrative that a person’s citizenship can be determined by looking at them.

Information Sharing

  1. On the basis of our principles, the Council is wary of information sharing and believes it should be done judiciously. We in particular want to prevent people’s private information from being used by foreign powers. We’d also prefer that Police, and the Intelligence services, could not access it.
  2. Section 303B, being repealed, has a number of safeguards under the definition of person of interest which are not replicated by this bill. In the existing act information sharing is limited either to:
    1.  Informing immigration in the country of arrival of the people who are departing; or
    2. Informing countries of people who have committed crimes in Aotearoa if we think those people intend to also commit crimes in their country.
  3. Under Clause 29, information about everyone is shared with everyone. Any person who has ever entered or left Aotearoa is in Immigration’s records.3 Immigration can share records about individuals with basically everyone, including countries where there is no reason to believe they will travel to. New section 294AAH needs a complete rewrite.
  4. New section 29AAH(j) makes “terrorism” a ground for information sharing. Terrorism has never had a workable definition in our laws. Given the shameful behaviour of the UK deeming Palestine Action a terrorist group, and the US’s embarrassing declaration of the fictional “antifa” as a terrorist group, the lack of a useful definition of the term allows it to most clearly apply to “people disliked by those in power.”

Recommendation 6
Remove clause 29, and therefore clause 31 from the bill, to retain the existing controls.

Recommendation 7
If the previous recommendation is not adopted, remove subsections a,b,g,h,i, and j from new section 29AAH.

Secrecy clauses

  1. New section 294AAJ(3) would be, by the Council’s recent count, the 86th statutory secrecy clause passed since the Official Information Act (OIA) in 1982. Section 294AAJ(3) is unnecessary, the OIA’s withholding provisions are in effect without it. All that section 294AAJ(3) does is allow for entire documents to be withheld when only portions of those documents qualify for redaction under the OIA.

Recommendation 8
Replace section 294AAJ(3) with “publication under subsection(2) is subject to withholdings specified in the Official Information Act.”

“Published on an Internet site”

  1. Our right to freedom of expression includes a right to be able to find information. The Council finds the phrase “published on an internet site” in new section 294AAJ and clause 40 to be peculiar. The typical requirement is for information to be published in the Gazette. The principal differences being that the Gazette makes it easy for people to find out what has changed, and that the Gazette doesn’t have a history of record keeping failures like Immigration New Zealand. 

Recommendation 9
Add an obligation to “put notice in the Gazette” to new sections 249AAJ and 383AA.

Privacy

  1. The Council opposes remote biometric identification. The principal distinction which we intend to make with the word “remote” is to differentiate from people using their own biometric identification as they so choose, for example to unlock their phone.
  2. The Council opposes the use of biometric identification by immigration, on the grounds that there can be no meaningful consent, given that immigration is empowered to effectively negate our civil liberties at the border. We are therefore opposed to the first proposal in the Amendment paper: “Proposal 1: Create a consequence for failure to engage in the biometric process”

Attorney General’s Bill of Rights Act Report (BORA report)

  1. The Council is once again profoundly disappointed in the BORA report.
  2. Paragraph 16 of the BORA report is factually incorrect. The power assessed in Paragraph 16 is already in section 280 of the principal act. This invalidates the reasoning in paragraph 20, and therefore negates the conclusion that there is no problem with unreasonable search and seizure.
  3. Paragraph 20 implies that the “core functions” of immigration officers are so vastly more important than people’s rights that a serious analysis is unnecessary. The Council holds the opposite view: that the core functions of immigration officers are so unimportant that slight limitations of our rights cannot be justified by them.
  4. The analysis on presumption of innocence is also unacceptable. Paragraph 27, instead of providing a justification for a limit on our freedoms, essentially advises that the government can hand out $1000 fines at any time for any reason. A BORA report is supposed to explain why limitations of our rights are for the greater good. This report has failed to do so.

Recommendation 10
The Committee should commission its own legal advice on compatibility with BORA.

Retroactive penalties

  1. Finally, the Council is greatly alarmed by paragraph 31 of the BORA report, which reads:

We do not consider that these provisions engage the right against retroactive penalties, as that right is concerned with criminal sanctions, whereas deportation is administrative in nature.

  1. The consequences of this opinion are wide ranging and devastating. Almost everything is administrative in nature. This interpretation suggests that the executive can retroactively apply any non-criminal sanction to people who have been found innocent in the events in question.
  2. The Council thanks members of the Committee for their time and consideration of our submission.
  1. RIS page 56:
    The cost associated with the preferred option is a greater number of deportation processes will likely progress, as larger volumes of non-compliance are identified. This will require more resources being attributed to deportation processes for MBIE ICI 
    ↩︎
  2.  RIS page 56 ↩︎
  3. Astute readers will note that Immigration seemingly has no problem with retaining records which give it power. ↩︎