Onus on SIS for Zaoui rethink

By CATHERINE MASTERS


A legal expert says the SIS should immediately re-evaluate the security risk certificate issued against Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui in light of a court decision which changes the rules holding him in prison.

Dr Andrew Ladley said if the certificate no longer stacked up under the new rules established from a Court of Appeal decision yesterday, Mr Zaoui should be released from prison.

The judgment, which found that Mr Zaoui's human rights should be taken into account during a review of the certificate, has put the onus on the SIS to come up with credible and verifiable evidence that he is a threat to national security.

Three judges ruled against the Crown case that the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Justice Paul Neazor, should not take those human rights into account.

They found the grounds for regarding if a person was a danger must be taken in conjunction with New Zealand's obligations under the Refugee Convention.

One of the judges, Justice Noel Anderson, said the security criteria would be met only if there were "objectively reasonable grounds based on credible evidence that Mr Zaoui constitutes a danger to the security of New Zealand of such seriousness that it would justify sending a person back to persecution.

"The threshold is high and must involve a danger of substantial threatened harm to the security of New Zealand."

There must also be a real connection between Mr Zaoui and the prospective or present danger with an appreciable alleviation of that danger from his deportation.

Dr Ladley, director of the Institute of Policy Studies at Victoria University's School of Government, described the decision as a warning for the state.

"The entire basis on which they thought they were holding him has in my view been altered.

"That therefore means they are obliged in my view as a matter of law to go back and retest that [the security risk certificate] now to see if they can meet it and if they can't, they should release him immediately."

Mr Zaoui arrived in New Zealand on false papers in December 2002. He was put in solitary confinement at Auckland Prison at Paremoremo but moved to Auckland Central Remand Prison after he was granted refugee status. But he is still in prison because of the security risk certificate issued on the basis of secret information held by the SIS.

That certificate is to be reviewed by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security but has been held up, until now, by court action.

Deborah Manning, one of Mr Zaoui's lawyers, called the decision a turning point in the case. She said the SIS had argued that New Zealand's reputation could be damaged by allowing Mr Zaoui to stay, which was not sufficient grounds to hold him.

Human Rights Commission lawyer Robert Hesketh said the decision made it clear Mr Zaoui had to be dealt with on the basis of objective, credible evidence, not vague hints of security suspicions which no one could scrutinise.