Column on MP shows ignorance
The article by Phil Quin (April 15), criticising MP Golriz Ghahraman for having defended a Rwandan charged with genocide is, frankly, beyond disgusting.
Mr Quin wants his piece to float on the (entirely respectable) campaign against terrorism, but he shows disgraceful ignorance in blaming a lawyer for the criminality of her client. And the fact that she has refused to comment on the matter is completely correct - I as a barrister conducted countless cases over 50 years in New Zealand and Australia, but it would still be unethical for me to comment on any of the details or express any opinion on any of my clients.
This may not suit Mr Quin’s muck-raking theme, but it is an essential part of our Western rule of law.
Ms Ghahraman was not working for her terrorist client, but for the International Criminal Tribunal, which supplied both judges and counsel for the genocide trial. John Burn, Merivale
Changed lives
I gather New Zealand is fairly unique in not having a Capital Gains Tax. Think of all those years other countries have stumped up and all the millions we could have paid to Pharmac so we could be the same as all those other countries that get all those drugs (the ones we aren’t sure about ‘in case they don’t work’).
We could try them out just like Australia or the UK or Canada.
But maybe it wouldn’t go to health?
I can’t wait to see how our lives will change.
MG Hudson, Edgeware
Notre Dame
I wish to share with all those French people living in Christchurch and beyond, and the many Francophones as well, my deep shock and distress at the disastrous fire which has engulfed the beautiful Cathedrale de Notre Dame.
Of course, along with memories of my visits to Notre Dame, including the two-hour wait to see the Gargoyle Garden, was an echo of sitting in grid-locked traffic listening to a voice on the Concert Programme saying, “The spire of the Christ Church Cathedral has fallen”. So our sorrow, dear friends, is not just sympathy but heartfelt empathy.
Thank you also to the Concert Programme (Charlotte Wilson) for your programme of beautiful French music and for the reminder that the Notre Dame school was crucially important in the development of polyphony and thus in the history of Western music.
One thing which will be unchanged; in front of Notre Dame is a brass plaque which marks the centre of Paris.
All distances are measured from there.
Elizabeth Winkworth, Papanui
Not humane
I found the opinion piece, ‘‘What’s in a Heartbeat?’’ by Siouxsie Wiles (April 15), morally incoherent.
In apparent response to the passing of the Ohio Heartbeat Bill, she argued for moral equivalence between heart tissue grown in the laboratory and that of a complete and newly developing human life in the womb. What sort of medical researcher would not know that heart tissue is not a human life or the undisputable scientific fact that human life begins at conception or even that an unborn child is not ‘‘the body of her mother’’? Wiles objected on humane grounds to dissecting dead rats at school and apparently that ‘moral’ concern is leading her to hope for more ‘humane’ methods of animal experimentation as a researcher.
Apparently she shares no such concern for the violent dismemberment of the unborn child.
It is difficult to imagine she could have written anything more directly antithetical to the meaning of humane.
Chris O’Brien, Bishopdale
Rebuild race
The Notre Dame originally took
182 years to build, and the Christ Church Cathedral only
21.
The Christchurch City Council has a seven-year start on Paris, but I think I’ll put my money on the French to win the race.
Steve Brown, West Melton