Acting Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters is rejecting the idea of measuring the Government’s performance against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
A team from the Human Rights Commission along with representatives of the Iwi Chairs Group are in Geneva this week to deliver a scathing assessment of the coalition Government’s policies to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Mr Peters says when the UN adopted the declaration in 2007 he advised then prime minister Helen Clark it was not needed for the New Zealand situation – but her successor John Key signed up while at the same time saying it would have no effect.
“So you have (Human Rights Commission) people now in Geneva making statements as if UNDRIP is the guiding light in this country and no one in this country voted for it, no one’s approved it in terms of a parliamentary decision and here we’ve got these claims being made which are fallacious in the extreme but no, you’ve got all these people picking at the crumbs so to speak to try and make a name for themselves using the taxpayers’ money and it’s wrong,” he says.
