Kim Dotcom and the Human Rights Review Tribunal

It’s really quite incredible how, at nearly every turn the New Zealand government has managed to mess up the legal case against Kim Dotcom.
Mike Masnick, Techdirt, March 26, 2018

Put it down to his tigerish perseverance, or sheer faith in those powers of endurance, but Kim Dotcom’s victory before New Zealand’s Human Rights Tribunal had a stirring ring to it. The Tribunal found for Dotcom, awarding him NZ$30,000 for “loss of a benefit” and NZ$60,000 for “loss of dignity and injury to feelings” incurred by breaches of the Privacy Act by the previous NZ Attorney-General.

In July 2015, Dotcom made various information privacy requests on his case made notorious by the FBI’s pursuit of him as a notable founder of Megaupload, a data sharing and storage enterprise that rankled with the copyright fanatics on the other side of the pond. The information requests were directed at what specific material various officials in the New Zealand government held on him. These requests, instead of being dealt with in immediate fashion, were conveyed to a less than sympathetic Attorney-General, Chris Finlaysen.

The position of the authorities proved bleak, unsympathetic and dismissive to Dotcom. In the words of the Solicitor-General to the Privacy Commissioner, these “were not genuine Privacy Act requests but rather a litigation tactic and a fishing expedition” with “an ulterior motive”. That motive was to frustrate his ongoing extradition hearing which is…

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