Jim Eagles: Echo of French perfidy in our halls of justice

The justice system is a strange creature. It can take an age to get around to punishing a thug who robs a pensioner. Try to use it to recover money from some ratbag and you could grow old waiting.

But over the past few weeks the High Court has managed to find the time to ponder concerns about the privacy of two French secret service agents involved in the 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.

Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur not only evaded justice for their part in blowing up the ship and killing Spanish photographer Fernando Pereira but were honoured by their country and have written books boasting about their roles.

Yet they can bring a legal action to try to stop Television New Zealand getting access to the official film footage of their public trial. Amazing.

Still, it does confirm that even the lowest of us have rights, and among those is the right to challenge official actions in court. And the decision by Justice Simon France that legitimate public interest overrides the pair's right to privacy confirms that there is still some sense in the system.

So - pending the possibility of the agents appealing to the Court of Appeal - it does appear as though this time the interests of justice have been served.

Unfortunately, as New Zealand discovered at the time of the bombing, it is a great deal harder to get any sort of justice in the international arena.

Indeed, with the 20th anniversary coming up on July 10 - and Rainbow Warrior 2 in port - it is instructive to recall just what went on.

The protest ship was attacked, remember, by the agents of one of our supposed allies, France, a country in whose defence New Zealanders have fought and died in two world wars.

Not only that, when two of the agents were caught and pleaded guilty to manslaughter, far from being apologetic France exerted huge trade pressure in support of their release.

Things got so ugly that United Nations Secretary-General Xavier Perez de Cuellar agreed to act as a mediator and the terms of settlement he came up with were incorporated in a formal treaty between the two countries.

The agents were allowed to serve out their prison terms in the French Pacific territory of Hao Atoll while the French agreed to pay some modest compensation and to forgo trade sanctions.

At the first opportunity, however, the French breached those terms and, to add insult to injury, not long after announced the resumption of nuclear testing in the South Pacific.

And who presided over that ignominious chapter? Why, none other than Jacques Chirac, first as Prime Minister and later as President, a man of whom David Lange, our prime minister at the time, said: "Chirac is a lying sod. Chirac is the person who brought two people off the island of Hao in absolute defiance of the treaty with New Zealand. He is the ultimate manipulator of opinion in terms of his own self-advancement and I wouldn't trust a word that he wrote or that he said."

I couldn't help recalling those words when our Government was idolising Chirac as a great statesman and noble peacemaker for his opposition to the United States invasion of Iraq.

It's awful to be cynical but I do have this faint suspicion that maybe Chirac's stance had more to do with advancing French commercial interests and boosting his own image than any belated conversion to the cause of peace.

Then again, cynicism is a useful tool for anyone trying to understand the workings of international relations, in which national interest has always come a long way ahead of noble principles.

Relations between countries have changed little in the 2500 years since Thucydides reports the Athenians telling the Melians: "You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

In such a world small countries have two basic options: place their faith in international bodies such as the UN or hang on to the coat-tails of a bigger power and look to it for protection.

Australia, with its memories of World War II - when the likelihood of a Japanese invasion was halted only by American victories at Midway and the Coral Sea - has thrown its lot in with the US. New Zealand, which has always been remote from conflict, looks mainly to the UN.

At the time of the Rainbow Warrior bombing we were out of favour with erstwhile allies such as the US and Britain because of our anti-nuclear policy, and they were not prepared to raise a murmur of protest at the appalling French behaviour.

So, as a firm believer in multilateral solutions to international problems, it was to the UN we turned for help.

Unfortunately, as we know, it didn't work out too well. The settlement itself was a disgrace since it's hard to imagine any other circumstance in which international terrorists would be released to their national territory to serve out their terms in comfort. And France was able to ignore even the minor obligations it owed.

The sad reality is that the UN is, in the classic Maoist sense, a paper tiger. It can open its mouth and snarl. But competing national interests mean it is rarely free to bite. And if it ever is set loose it depends on other countries to provide the teeth and ends up with a set of ill-fitting dentures.

As a result the UN wasn't able to bring France to heel when it gave the Secretary-General the finger. We were left gnashing our tiny teeth in impotent rage.

That raises two questions for New Zealanders to ponder: Is there any prospect of us facing a similar or worse international confrontation in the foreseeable future? And, if one does arise, would the UN be of any greater use next time around?

* Jim Eagles is the Herald's travel editor.