look forward to the implementation passing into law of the Military
Justice Legislation Amendment Bill.
Justice Legislation Amendment Bill. I call Louisa
Wall.
We are having a split call, and I do appreciate you allowing me to
go first.
first. As
first. As a member of the
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade
Select Committee, we have considered the Military
Justice Legislation Amendment Bill. Essentially I just wanted to
start with the purpose of the bill.
Essentially, it's to bring
efficiency, transparency,
efficiency, transparency, consistency between both
the military justice system and
our criminal justice system. 'Cause
currently, they're separate. And
so the objective has been to
align military justice with
criminal justice, because at the end of the
day, the people that are part of
our society whom our criminal
justice system serves, and people in
the military, are
military, are actually equal citizens of our country. And so
the whole objective of this bill is
to ensure fairness and equality of
justice, but also to ensure that
victims of serious
crime actually have the same rights and
receive the same support. And so we really need
to look at where, I guess,
the context of this change came from. It
was actually a review of
the military justice system that took
place between 2002 and 2006. It was
to look at whether or
not the military justice
military justice system was robust and fair, and to align it with
our criminal justice system. I do want
to note that the review was
a collaboration between the
New Zealand Defence Force, the Ministry
of Justice, the Chief Judge
of the Court Martial, and
specifically in consultation with the New Zealand
Law Society and Victims' Support. It
made amendments in the
following
The first, and one of the foci of this piece of
legislation, was around victims' rights. So it was to
ensure that it conferned the
same rights to military victims of
serious offences, including sexual
or violent offences, to
those rights afforded victims in the
civilian criminal justice system. I
think we've all become a lot more aware
of the sensitivities in those
situations and making sure
that victims have access immediately to
counselling
counselling and other support services given the trauma of being a
victim of sexual violence. It also
was about judicial appointments
and ensuring that judicial appointments
were fit for purpose. And that
purpose was to ensure that
there were no conflicts of interest. And
were no conflicts of interest. And also to separate what interestingly
have been a kind
of situation within the military system where military
commanding
commanding officers essentially had all the power and could do
whatever they wanted. And I will
talk about a case from the UK
which kind of highlights all the flaws
in the military justice system. It was
also about court martial procedure and
whether an accused was, in the
first instance, unfit to stand
trial. Because what you have in the
military justice system was a
trial, and then there was an
assessment about whether or not that
person was incapacitated
incapacitated and actually should have stood trial in the first place.
So if people are
unfit to stand trial
So if people are unfit to stand
illness or they are deemed by a psychiatrist to be in a state of
insanity and they shouldn't
be held accountable for their actions
in fact why would we go through an entire court process if someone was
unfit to stand
The other major focus, Mr Speaker, has been on the onus of proof. The
onus of proof
has been on the onus of proof. The
the criminal justice system, if someone like the police takes
a charge against you, they have to
prove that you've committed a crime.
In the military justice system,
actually by mere virtue of you
being charged, there's
charged, there's an assumption that you're guilty. And so, again, that
was probably a big highlight. But
what I wanted to share was that,
you know, these things have been driven
because of precedents. There was a
case in the European Court of
Human
a soldier had fought in the Falklands. He'd
Falklands. He'd witnessed horrific things, and he actually had
a mental breakdown while he was
still working for the military. Tried
to kill himself. Shot a television. And he
went right through the court
martial process. And so... ..that shouldn't
happen. And this bill will
stop that in the future. Kia ora. The
Hon David Bennett. Just
following on from previous speakers
in this debate, I think
everyone's pretty much of the same ilk in that
we need to make sure that the military
justice legislation is updated to
take into account an environment
where there is that
take into account an environment
there is treatment in the military system that is commensurate with
what you would get
in the criminal justice system and so that there
is no sense that victims