Peter Hosking: Zaoui a victim of unfounded rumour

COMMENT

Once again, Ahmed Zaoui has been publicly maligned by intelligence services without an opportunity to respond or a shred of evidence offered in support.

The Weekend Herald reports by its Paris-based correspondent have raised no new information about him. They cite nothing that has not already been thoroughly examined by New Zealand's independent Refugee Status Appeals Authority.

Once again, a spy (a French one this time) is able to present rumour and speculation without any verifiable evidence. Worse, no mention is made of widely acknowledged French complicity in the armed coup that overthrew Mr Zaoui's political party (the FIS) in 1992.

This just might explain why the French security services (and their Belgian partners) have an ongoing interest in undermining the credibility of FIS politicians in exile around the world.

Neither the French nor New Zealand security services seem to appreciate that the Zaoui case has moved well beyond the point where voicing suspicion and mere allegation suffices.

Of course, we need those who protect our national security to be alert and suspicious. But we also need them to be able to process the information they acquire to assess what data has some probative value, to discard that which doesn't stand up to analysis and to balance rumour and speculation with investigation and scrutiny.

This is something the New Zealand intelligence services have so far failed to do in Mr Zaoui's case. When forced by the courts to produce a summary of its allegations against him, the SIS presented nothing that had not already been examined and dismissed by the appeals authority, other than an obviously benign home video of his travels in Asia.

Indeed, when provided with an opportunity by the authority to present the unclassified material it held about Mr Zaoui, the SIS included demonstrably inaccurate media reports from the internet. There was no analysis of the information provided.

"That the SIS was content to rely on such a self-evidently dubious source ... is most surprising," said the appeals authority in the restrained language of a judicial body. "We were surprised at how limited [the SIS unclassified material] was and the questionable nature of some of the contents."

The SIS presented such a hopelessly inadequate case based on its unclassified material to the authority that it has undermined the credibility of any classified information it claims to hold about Mr Zaoui.

The authority is the only organisation that has so far undertaken any balanced analysis of Mr Zaoui's background. It concluded there was no substance behind the very allegations that have been aired (once again) in the Weekend Herald.

In a 223-page decision, the authority granted Mr Zaoui refugee status, rejecting the notion that he was any threat to national security. The authority has extremely rigorous procedures and last year rejected nearly 90 per cent of the appeals it heard.

In Mr Zaoui's case, after a 13-day hearing, an in-depth analysis of the French and Belgian judgments about Mr Zaoui and of many thousands of pages of other evidence, and after hearing from several witnesses and international experts, the authority's panel of three senior lawyers reached a number of conclusions:

* That Mr Zaoui had not committed, participated in, directed or supported any act of terrorism, violence or other criminal conduct, either for the terrorist organisation GIA or for any other group (including financial or logistical support).

* That Mr Zaoui had only ever been a member of the FIS - a political party that is the democratically elected Algerian Government-in-exile.

* That the FIS and the GIA are diametrically opposed in every conceivable way and that, anyway, the GIA is a counter-insurgency operation set up by the Algerian regime.

* That the GIA had, in fact, issued a death sentence against Mr Zaoui because of his condemnation of the violence in Algeria, his calls for the appointment of an international, independent inquiry into the human rights violations in Algeria, and the peaceful expression of his political views.

As the authority records, a massive campaign of disinformation has been embarked on in Europe by the Algerian intelligence services in an effort to bolster the military regime and discredit Mr Zaoui's political party. Lies and slander were injected into Europe's intelligence-gathering system and into the media.

For this reason the authority concluded that any intelligence information on Mr Zaoui originating from France and Belgium was of questionable value in the light of the close relationship that Algerian secret services enjoy with their colleagues in France (the former colonial power).

There is no reference to the authority's analysis in the Weekend Herald reports; neither do they question the reliability or integrity of the opinions proffered or query what vested interests might be at stake in the world of French intelligence. There seems to have been no attempt to interview the numerous European experts identified by the authority or even former Algerian intelligence officials who have spoken in support of Mr Zaoui.

The views of French magistrates and public prosecutors are set out, with no mention that the authority adjudged Mr Zaoui's French (and Belgian) convictions unsafe, and their pre-trial and evidential procedures flawed.

The French verdict against Mr Zaoui was delivered several years after the event, when he was in Malaysia, and only two days after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Neither is the authority the only tribunal in the world to view French judicial procedures relating to Algerian nationals with cynicism. British courts routinely refuse to heed extradition requests from the French, citing the questionable levels of justice that those courts dispense.

Indeed, the entire French judicial system is increasingly under attack from international human rights observers, who have documented numerous examples of political interference, flawed procedures and poor judicial weighing of evidence.

As the authority noted, despite the apparent seriousness of the accusations that the French prosecutors now level against Mr Zaoui, neither the French nor the Belgian courts have ever requested Mr Zaoui's extradition.

Given the independence and thoroughness of the authority's decision, simple justice requires that when supposedly new information about Mr Zaoui is aired, it is subjected to similar scrutiny, whether in the media or by our security service.

We have a reputation for giving people a fair go. In the light of the serial injustices that have been visited on Mr Zaoui in the past dozen years by various nations, the least we can do is to give him a fair go here.

The Herald responds

Peter Hosking's response to Catherine Field's reports on Ahmed Zaoui is similar to that made by other supporters of Mr Zaoui.

It claims again that there was nothing new in the reports and points to the Refugee Status Appeals Authority ruling as the last word on the case, saying it is the only "balanced" analysis of Mr Zaoui's background.

On both counts Mr Hosking is wrong.

The authority's ruling is not balanced.

In deciding that Mr Zaoui's convictions in France and Belgium were unsafe it heard extensively from Mr Zaoui criticising the convictions, but nothing from the other side to defend them.

Indeed, it did not even see the files of evidence against him but relied solely on the judgments.

Neither did it hear expert evidence from Europe to balance the views of Professor Emile Joffe, of Cambridge University, an expert witness for Zaoui who was enormously influential in the decision.

What was new about the Weekend Herald reports was that Catherine Field filled a number of those gaps and went some way towards redressing the balance.

Unlike the appeals authority, Field has seen the evidence in France.

Unlike the appeals authority, she has spoken to a wide range of informed sources in Europe - not just a spy as Mr Hosking claims - whose views differ from those of Professor Joffe.

What emerged from Field's work was a picture that balanced the black-and-white, heroes-and-villains portrait painted by Mr Zaoui's lawyers and reflected by the appeals authority.

Reality turned out to be much more untidy and ambiguous than they would like people to think.

But what is not ambiguous is that Zaoui's lawyers do not really believe there is nothing new in the Weekend Herald reports.

Behind the scenes, they have been trying to identify Catherine Field's sources. If there was nothing new, why would they bother?

* Peter Hosking is the executive director of the Human Rights Foundation.

Herald Feature: Ahmed Zaoui, parliamentarian in prison

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