Common sense and terror laws
teaching fellow in the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at Massey University
The tortured saga of the Terrorism Suppression Bill reflects the failure of successive governments to legislatively address the problem. The spat between National and Labour complicated what should have been a simple precaution.
While the Greens have now backed the bill, they are not the party we look to for genuine understanding of national security issues, and their amendments reflect their ongoing distrust of our national security system, and the people in it.
Composing a solution to anything relies on accurately judging the problem and, to be clear, returning foreign terrorist fighters have not materialised as a major threat for any country to date, and fears of their imminent return and risk are much greater than their reality.
But there is still the issue of one country’s citizens heading off and joining the ranks of terrorist groups in another – more than 40,000 people from more than 80 countries are estimated to have joined Isis and other groups. Isis was always destined to lose, and those who went to war zones and survived were inevitably – eventually – going to want to come back.
Fit-for-purpose legislation now needs to embrace the potential for terrorist acts to be investigated, the risk to New Zealanders posed by returnees to be assessed and managed, along with returnees’ mental and physical health requirements and, ultimately, their
This law allowed for the cancellation of passports for those suspected of an intention to travel to join a terrorist group, but failed to make it an offence to do so, or to consider that those who went might come back.
The provisions lapsed six months before the Intelligence and Security Act 2017 made them permanent, leaving a critical gap. Overall, New Zealand’s approach to foreign terrorist fighters has been shabby, and National’s protests that the current Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill does only half the job resemble its own half-done efforts previously.
The current Government’s approach is a step in the direction of a more comprehensive approach. It proposes court-imposed conditions, assessed on evidence of risk, for limited periods of time, and giving the state some measure of control over those returning. This is to ensure oversight of steps taken to reintegrate them.
But it is still a three-quarter solution, prompted by the fact that Mark Taylor may not remain in a Kurdish prison. It perhaps assumes he is the only one we need to worry about, but is he?
Human rights, but whose rights?
Enter the Greens – unconvincing in national security dialogue at the best of times, and ever the defenders of human rights. We live in a country that holds our rights and freedoms dearly, and their defence of those is a credit to them. But the Terrorism Suppression Bill is hampered by a convoluted definition of terrorism.
The Greens’ claim that our definition is a higher standard than others is unconvincing. Our definition is confusing. When it comes to those who wilfully engage with brutal and oppressive regimes, it’s our rights, not theirs, that should take precedence.
There is no need to go to the extremes some countries have, but matching legislation to risk is a sensible precaution – ensuring our own safety is not an excessive action.
The risk posed by returning foreign terrorist fighters is not great, it will not be expensive to prepare a process to assess and mitigate it, and the opportunity exists to take a wellconsidered approach to tidy up at least one part of our otherwise chaotic terrorism legislation.
However, squabbling between our parliamentarians does not leave much confidence that this will actually occur, and horse-trading practicalities for principles will inevitably lead to legislation that sounds all very well, but may not be effective in practice.