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Review focused on human rights

Wellington higher courts reporter

The way some of New Zealand’s worst criminals are sentenced and treated after their sentences is being reviewed.

A Law Commission review is looking at the balance between protecting the public from the possible future crimes of people who have committed particular sexual and violent offences, against the human rights of the offenders.

Three regimes authorised some of the most coercive exercises of state power known to New Zealand law, the commission said.

Commission principal legal and policy adviser John-Luke Day said it asked for public submissions on the issues in a first round of consultation ending on July

28. A second consultation is due next year.

It covered the sentence of preventive detention, a potentially open-ended term for high-risk sexual and violent offenders. As at June 2022, 310 people were subject to the sentence, some of them on life parole.

The review also covered extended supervision orders (ESO) and public protection orders (PPO), both of which were court-ordered restrictions on the freedom of offenders after their sentences ended.

Public protection orders were the more severe of the two and were open-ended, with detainees housed within a prison precinct and escorted for trips outside the unit. The orders were regularly reviewed. Four had been imposed as at June 2022.

Extended supervision orders lasted up to 10 years, and could be repeated. They could include a period of 24-hour monitoring, and continuing restrictions including where the person could live and go. As at June 2022, 205 people were on extended supervision orders.

PPOs and ESOs were currently the subject of a case before the Supreme Court where a decision was awaited. A central issue before the court was whether the orders breached a right not to be punished a second time for the same offence.

Preventive detention orders had been the subject of a complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Committee in 2017 which found two men had been subject to arbitrary detention, in breach of rights New Zealand had agreed to uphold.

The Law Commission said the United Nations and the Supreme Court cases prompted the review.

Human rights lawyer Tony Ellis represented the offenders in both. He also acted for Alf Vincent who served 52 years’ preventive detention before being freed. Vincent was virtually on his deathbed when he finally left prison and

died about two months later, Ellis said.

The commission’s project seemed to cover the issues needed, he said. It was the most helpful thing to happen in the field since he started working in that area of law in 1998.

It was harder to get parole from a sentence of preventive detention than it was from a life term for murder, he said. Providing rehabilitation would turn it into something more humane. It was also a dumping ground for the

intellectually disabled.

He acknowledged some were very dangerous people when they started their sentences, but continuing treatment would give a better, cheaper outcome.

The commission’s project included looking at whether the sentences should have a stronger element of therapy and rehabilitation, and whether the way future risk is predicted was still appropriate.

The review also covered issues including the over-representation

of Māori among those sentenced to preventive detention and ESOs, whether there should be more recognition for the importance tikanga placed on restoring relationships and what the commission was told was a strong wish among Māori to have a greater role in managing their own people and the risk they might pose.

The Law Commission is an independent Crown entity to review the law and recommend changes.

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2023-06-08T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-08T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281668259372341

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