{"id":338560,"date":"2017-12-09T02:43:37","date_gmt":"2017-12-09T01:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/right-wing-attack-on-new-zealand-green-mp\/"},"modified":"2017-12-09T02:43:37","modified_gmt":"2017-12-09T01:43:37","slug":"right-wing-attack-on-new-zealand-green-mp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/right-wing-attack-on-new-zealand-green-mp\/","title":{"rendered":"Right-wing attack on New Zealand Green MP"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content\">\n<h3 class=\"nomargin\">\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h2>Right-wing attack on New Zealand Green MP<\/h2>\n<h5>\n<p>    By<br \/>\n    John Braddock<br \/>\n    <br \/>8 December 2017<\/p>\n<\/h5>\n<p>The New Zealand Criminal Bar Association took the unusual step on November 30 of releasing a statement defending Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman, whose previous role as a lawyer with UN agencies has become the subject of a vicious right-wing campaign.<\/p>\n<p>Ghahraman, 36, who is Iranian by birth, has lived in New Zealand since she was nine, when her family was granted asylum as political refugees. She entered parliament following the September 23 election this year and was widely hailed as the first \u201crefugee\u201d politician\u2014evidence of the country\u2019s commitment to \u201cdiversity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This abruptly changed when Ghahraman\u2019s work history was publicly denounced by former Labour Party staffer Phil Quin. In a series of tweets, Quin declared that Ghahraman had volunteered to defend \u201cthe worst killers known to man\u201d at the Rwanda Tribunal and brander her a genocide-denier.<\/p>\n<p>Ghahraman had worked as an unpaid intern in a team that defended Joseph Nzirorera, who died before he could be convicted over the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and in a paid position representing singer Simon Bikindi, who was convicted for incitement to genocide.<\/p>\n<p>Citing this, Quin fulminated: \u201cAny MP who acted as a voluntary intern to defend war criminals, and authors papers that deny the Rwandan genocide, must resign.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The <em>New Zealand Herald<\/em> published an article on November 28 claiming that Ghahraman had defended the \u201cbutcher of Bosnia.\u201d She was a junior member of the legal defence team for Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107 who was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Herald<\/em> reported that Ghahraman\u2019s profile on the Green Party\u2019s web site had been changed, following her own admission that it&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2017\/12\/08\/nzre-d08.html\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 Right-wing attack on New Zealand Green MP By John Braddock 8 December 2017 The New Zealand Criminal Bar Association took the unusual step on November 30 of releasing a statement defending Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman, whose previous role as a lawyer with UN agencies has become the subject of a vicious right-wing campaign. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-338560","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}