15 December 1998 GOVERNMENT TO INTRODUCE AMENDMENT TO NZSIS LEGISLATION The Government will introduce an amendment to legislation this week covering the operations of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, and will also seek to appeal part of the Choudry decision of the Court of Appeal, Prime Minister Jenny Shipley said today. "In Mr Choudry's case, the Court of Appeal pointed out the need for Parliament to provide express authority for the NZSIS to enter private premises, without permission, to intercept communications." "It is vital that the NZSIS is able to carry out its functions properly in gathering intelligence on security threats to New Zealand. In some rare instances, this may require covert entry to private property, which the amendment to the legislation will allow. The existing law had been presumed to allow this to occur. The Court has said if this is the intention, it should be made explicit as is the case in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia." [...] Mrs Shipley said the Government would also seek leave to appeal against one aspect of the Court of Appeal's decision in Mr Choudry's case. The issue concerns the procedure the Court should follow when the Government asserts it is necessary, in the course of litigation against the Crown, to withhold from the Court, and other parties, access to information, in order to protect national security interests. Commentary: Choudry was a protestor against the 1994 APEC meeting held in Auckland (a bunch of foreign politicians turned up to talk for a week, shutting down the city centre in a way that wasn't equalled until Mercury Energy earlier this year). At the time the SIS's mandate had been widened to include "economic security", bringing the APEC meeting into its sphere of interest. As part of the APEC brouhaha, they carried out a black bag job on Choudry and got caught, causing the government some embarassment. The current bill, rushed through under urgency just before parliament shuts down (which means it gets rubberstamped with no scrutiny or debate), would legalise these things in the future, just in time for the next big politicians powwow next year (which has already lead to the army invading the university as part of some training exercise which involved a simulated search for dissidents). The second part is more worrying, what it'll do is remove any provision for judicial review of dubious actions by the government by allowing them to claim national security concerns as a blanket excuse for whatever they do. Certainly in the Choudry case the real concern was job security, not national security. Peter.