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The cockroach of the globe, New Zealand. Photo: Getty Images
The cockroach of the globe, New Zealand. Photo: Getty Images

SocietyJanuary 31, 2020

Scrutiny of NZ’s human rights record is coming here, and we should welcome it

The cockroach of the globe, New Zealand. Photo: Getty Images
The cockroach of the globe, New Zealand. Photo: Getty Images

Independent experts will soon arrive in New Zealand to assess our human rights record. We should embrace these visits as a chance to do better, writes chief human rights commissioner Paul Hunt.

A strong democracy, at ease with itself, welcomes constructive scrutiny. That’s why as a country we should be able to welcome the arrival of three United Nations human rights experts over the next few weeks, each invited by the government.

It’s easy to live in a bubble and think we’re doing well. It’s not until a catastrophe like the Christchurch massacres irrevocably bursts that bubble that we’re forced to reassess. An immeasurably better way to challenge complacency, and recognise our shortcomings, is to invite outside perspectives.

Scrutiny can be uncomfortable, but it helps to keep us real.

One of the pending UN visitors to New Zealand will look at the human right to a decent home. Another will look at the human rights of older people. And the third will focus on the human right to an equitable health system for all. Each is an expert in their field.

Beginning some 50 years ago, New Zealand signed up to these international human rights. In fact, we helped draft and establish them within the UN.

These three visits are the first of this type of outside scrutiny New Zealand has experienced for six years. The government deserves credit for being open to these outside perspectives and ending a lean run.

Each of these visits is timely for New Zealand. In comparison to many other countries, we have a good overall human rights record. But if you look at some specific human rights, our performance is disappointing. 

Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), the ground-breaking international human rights project based in Wellington, uses data to track and compare countries’ human rights performances. In relation to the right to adequate housing, the HRMI places New Zealand 34 out of 48 high-income countries, behind Malta and South Korea. In relation to the right to education, HRMI places us 12 out of 40 high-income countries, behind Poland and Singapore. These scores are based on national averages, so they do not capture the much worse situation of groups such as Māori, disabled people, Pacific people, women and the rainbow community.

Although HRMI remains a work-in-progress, it’s beginning to confirm that New Zealand has a lot of room for human rights improvement. My hope is that we will benefit from constructive feedback on our human rights record. Our visitors come from Canada, Chile and Lithuania. They were selected by the UN Human Rights Council, which consists of governments. They are not officials on the UN payroll. Once appointed, they are independent and accountable to the Council. 

Each expert will be in the country for about 10 days to listen and discuss. On their departure, they’ll make preliminary suggestions and then later write a formal report for the UN. When each report is orally presented in Geneva, the government of the day has the right of reply.

For six years, I served as a UN independent expert with a focus on the human right to an equitable health system. In numerous UN reports, one of my aims was to help governments, whatever their political complexion, to find ways of honouring their international human rights promises. I tried to convey that human rights make societies fairer and more inclusive. Our visitors will probably take a similar approach.

There’s some evidence to suggest these visits can lift a country’s human rights record. The Brookings Institute’s study, Catalysts for Change, concluded that UN independent human rights experts help to translate international human rights into practical outcomes.

In my experience, the record is patchy. There’s evidence that Sweden listened and acted on a health-rights report I wrote in 2006, whereas Cuba, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia derided my earlier report which called for human rights for the rainbow community. This hostile response was predictable, but you have an obligation to speak up.

Our UN visitors will also speak up when they see human rights failings. They will hold up a mirror and, as Robbie Burns wrote, help us see ourselves as others see us. They will acknowledge successes, make constructive suggestions and remind us of successive governments’ human rights promises to everyone in New Zealand.

As they’re only here for 10 days, they can’t tell us how to make universal human rights a reality in the everyday lives of all New Zealanders. We must figure that out for ourselves in the rich complexity of our unique, extraordinary society founded on Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

But if we’re willing, our visitors can give us a helping hand.

Keep going!
Waitangi Day at the Treaty Grounds; and Auckland Pride marchers on Queen St (Photos: Getty Images; Sam Sutherland)
Waitangi Day at the Treaty Grounds; and Auckland Pride marchers on Queen St (Photos: Getty Images; Sam Sutherland)

SocietyJanuary 30, 2020

Waitangi Day and Auckland Pride: An intertwined history of oppression

Waitangi Day at the Treaty Grounds; and Auckland Pride marchers on Queen St (Photos: Getty Images; Sam Sutherland)
Waitangi Day at the Treaty Grounds; and Auckland Pride marchers on Queen St (Photos: Getty Images; Sam Sutherland)

As both negotiate the complexities of being part memorial, part protest and part celebration, an empathetic allegiance between Waitangi Day and the Auckland Pride Festival has the potential of collective empowerment, writes Richard Orjis. 

Waitangi Day falls in the middle of this year’s Auckland Pride Festival. Rather than being strange bedfellows in the summer cultural calendar, these events may be considered in terms of the historical contexts they share: confronting social oppression and ongoing emancipatory struggles. 

The signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi/The Treaty of Waitangi occurred in 1840. In 1858, New Zealand adopted English law act, which included the outlawing of homosexuality. The decades preceding the signing were marked by an oppressive regime for indigenous communities and queer lives. This negatively impacted the spiritual, socio-economic and cultural wellbeing of Māori, while LGBTQI+ people of all cultural backgrounds experienced fear of incarceration, hospitalisation or ostracisation. Although it has now been more than 30 years since homosexual law reform in Aotearoa, and despite increased social acceptance, discrimination and inherent biases are still realities in our legal, education and healthcare systems.

Demonstrators march in support of homosexual law reform in Wellington in 1985 (Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library / http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22878952)

Waitangi Day and the Pride Festival continue to negotiate the complexities of being part memorial, part protest and part celebration (to some). It is the work of both to open up the possibilities for coalition across barriers of gender, race, religion, class and sexuality; to take up the challenge of acknowledging, recognising and upholding differences, while at the same time enabling unity. With this challenge sometimes comes conflict, both from outside and within our communities. These frictions don’t necessarily need to be shied away from, however, or viewed as unproductive. For example, after the heated backlash against the banning of police uniforms that resulted (due to the subsequent withdrawal of corporate sponsorship) in the cancellation of the 2019 Pride Parade down Ponsonby Road, this year we are seeing a record number of festival events and new pools of funding. 

Minority groups are often persecuted by the same dominant power structures, and furthermore, LGBTQI+ people come from and exist within all communities in Aotearoa, including Māori. Pride should honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a living document, and one that signifies living relationships. The implications of this include taking a stand alongside Māori on issues of ongoing institutional racism in the New Zealand police force or the land injustices highlighted at Ihumātao. An empathetic allegiance between Waitangi Day and the Auckland Pride Festival has the potential of collective empowerment.

‘Mana Takatāpui’ by Elizabeth Kerekere (Image: Office of the Clerk)

Te Tiriti o Waitangi may be read as holding the desire for different groups of people to form a peaceful and mutually beneficial partnership. It opened the doors for my ancestors to migrate from Europe with the hope of creating a better life here in the South Pacific. At the same time, it can’t be denied that the colonial project itself enacted a fast-paced and violent reimagining, reforming and renaming of Aotearoa, resulting in the transfer of political and economic power into the hands of the British Empire. 

New Zealand’s history exposes the criminalisation of homosexuality that was part of the globalised British colonial legacy. In The Empire Remains Shop, human rights activist and lawyer Ritchie Maitland calls to attention that the 1860s penal code was laid out with a colonial moral mission in mind, intended to protect Christians from “corruption” and to “Christianise” indigenous practices and ways of being. Maitland points out that of the nine countries in the Pacific where homosexuality remains illegal, eight are former British colonies. Debate about the decriminalisation of homosexuality is presently playing out in Kūki ‘Āirani, the Cook Islands. Although self-governed, Cook Islanders are New Zealand citizens. In contrast, laws against same-sex sexual activity have never existed in French Polynesia.

Ngahuia te Awekotuku (Photo: gg.govt.nz)

The British laws that arrived with colonisation created a social stigma around same-sex relationships that Māori scholars such as Alison Laurie, Elizabeth Kerekere and Ngahuia te Awekotuku say did not exist before in Aotearoa, suggesting that Māori were historically more openly accepting of gender and sexual fluidity; as Kerekere writes in her PhD research, takatāpui have always been just “part of the whānau”. Along with the Māori scholars and activists mentioned above, Māori have long been at the forefront of Rainbow visibility in this country, from cultural icons to politicians, including Carmen Rupe, Mika Haka, Witi Ihimaera, Georgina Beyer and Louisa Wall. Furthermore, it was Te Awekotuku’s fiery speech at the Auckland University quad in 1972 that started the Gay Liberation Movement and Protest in Albert Park that this year’s Pride Festival is celebrating.

Additionally, the historical accounts mentioned above, of an open and accepting view of gender and sexual diversity held by Māori, offer all LGBTQI+ people a powerful alternative to the more familiar colonising narratives of persecution. Gender and sexually diverse people have been here as long as people have walked along these shores; these are histories that offer hope, inclusion, connection and, importantly, are rooted in the place where we stand.

  • Richard Orjis  is an AUT postgraduate student and artist