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.
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 “refugee” politician—evidence of the country’s commitment to “diversity.”
This abruptly changed when Ghahraman’s 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 “the worst killers known to man” at the Rwanda Tribunal and brander her a genocide-denier.
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.
Citing this, Quin fulminated: “Any MP who acted as a voluntary intern to defend war criminals, and authors papers that deny the Rwandan genocide, must resign.”
The New Zealand Herald published an article on November 28 claiming that Ghahraman had defended the “butcher of Bosnia.” She was a junior member of the legal defence team for Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadžić who was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
The Herald reported that Ghahraman’s profile on the Green Party’s web site had been changed, following her own admission that it…