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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has criticised proposed new secrecy provisions aimed at keeping potential terrorists out of New Zealand.
The commissioner's Canberra-based regional representative for the South Pacific, former Auckland lawyer Rick Towle, said the provisions in the Immigration Bill would be "harder and more vague" than similar laws in Britain and other European countries.
The bill allows for the use of classified information in any immigration case relating to "matters of security, criminal conduct or matters that may have a significant impact on New Zealand's international reputation".
It says applicants must be given a summary of the allegations arising from the classified information, but withholds any information which may prejudice New Zealand security, law and order, the safety of any person, or the confidentiality of information from foreign governments.
Law Society representative Peter Moses criticised the same provisions last month as "a Kafkaesque nightmare".
Mr Towle, in Auckland yesterday to meet local refugee groups, said the provisions were "too wide and too vague".
"Our position is that someone trying to make a refugee claim should be entitled to know what there is against them because the consequence of getting it wrong in a refugee case can be a matter of life and death.
"We accept that there may be very rare cases where information regarding national security cannot be fully disclosed and that an appropriate filtering mechanism should be in place, but our sense is that the criteria for classification are too wide and too vague and don't seem to be confined to those rare cases of national security."
He also criticised another clause in the bill that would reject a refugee claim if the claimant "may have lodged, or had the opportunity to lodge, a claim for recognition as a refugee or for protection in another country".
He said that clause had been picked up from Europe, where most nations had signed the UN Refugee Convention and had arrangements to make sure refugees were given protection in an appropriate country.
New Zealand was in a totally different situation because most Southeast Asian nations, which were the most likely transit points for refugees coming here, had not signed the Refugee Convention.
"The dangers are that there is no appropriate place for people to be sent back to. That's why we are against that being brought into the legislation," he said.
Australia had adopted the same clause but "We don't like that either. New Zealand has a great reputation internationally for dealing with refugees, but we can never take that for granted.
"You have to keep it in context. New Zealand gets 200 or 300 asylum-seekers a year. That's the equivalent of one boatload from North Africa to Europe in a day.
"So when you look at proposals for changes to our legislative framework, you have to keep it in context. You don't want to use a sledgehammer to crush a fly."
Mr Towle, 50, became involved in refugee work with Vietnamese boat people as a lawyer for Auckland law firm Haigh Lyon in the 1980s.
