TVNZ wins right to screen Rainbow Warrior trial tapes

The Rainbow Warrior after it was bombed in 1985.

TVNZ has seen off the final legal challenge by French spies Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur to prevent screening of their guilty pleas to the manslaughter of Fernando Pereira.

TVNZ had fought a 20-year battle to get the court tapes and the French fought at every turn, TVNZ's head of news and current affairs Bill Ralston said.

TVNZ would screen the tapes on its Sunday current affairs programme this week after the Supreme Court today dismissed an application for leave to appeal from the agents. TVNZ was awarded $2500 costs.

In August, three Appeal Court judges gave TVNZ permission to show the footage of the agents pleading guilty in the High Court trial that followed the 1985 Rainbow Warrior bombing.

Some of the footage was screened on TV One at the time but a plan to screen extended footage on the Sunday programme was halted by court action.

Mr Ralston said TVNZ fought to screen the tapes because "it was an important issue for the preservation of New Zealand history".

He said work would have to be done on the tapes to restore them and put them on a modern format.

"In circumstances that it is hard to imagine ever being repeated in this country, the appellants pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1985," the Supreme Court said.

The agents proposed to argue that the Court of Appeal failed to weigh their privacy against the freedom of information interests championed by TVNZ.

"We have not been satisfied that this is a proper case to be heard by this court," the Supreme Court judgment concluded.

"This is a very unusual case, which, an appeal on the merits having been heard and determined in the Court of Appeal, no longer raises any question of general or public importance."

During the Court of Appeal hearing lawyers for the French spies argued they never approved the closed circuit television footage being kept as a permanent record.

The Rainbow Warrior was bombed in Auckland Harbour on July 11, 1985, killing Mr Pereira.

It was later revealed France's then-president Francois Mitterand personally authorised the attack on a ship that had led the Greenpeace campaign against French nuclear tests on Mururoa Atoll.

The agents have since written books in which they described the experience of going up in court, and neither said it was humiliating or debasing.

The videotape was initially supposed to play on TVNZ during a documentary on the 20th anniversary of the bombing of last year.

- NZPA