Credit: Luke

I’m starting to believe that Golriz Ghahraman can’t actually recognise the truth.

In February of this year she wrote:

Now this can’t be blamed on editors, journalists or even staff. She wrote it herself.

Note how she has now been promoted to “prosecuting heads of state”. Here is her problem, We know there were no heads of state prosecuted in Rwanda, she only defended former PM of Kosovo, Radovan Karadžić in the Yugoslavia trials and he wasn’t a head of state. Slobodan Milošević was a sitting head of state but Golriz Ghahraman didn’t prosecute him. There were no heads of state prosecuted in the Cambodian trials, in fact only 5 people were prosecuted there and not one was a head of state.

This article contains a direct lie about her human rights legal experience.

-Research by Sally, Impolitkal

screenshot-Whaleoil

James Shaw has made two speeches where he claimed that Golriz Ghahraman was a prosecutor at the United Nations.

This is one he gave to the NZ Institute of International Affairs:

In another speech he also said:

And of course, many of you will have already read about Golriz Ghahraman, who came to New Zealand as a nine-year old refugee from Iran, and who is now an Oxford-educated human rights lawyer who puts war criminals on trial at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

Was he mistaken then as well? Who precisely are these war criminals she put on trial at The Hague? The only person at The Hague she was involved with was Radovan Karadzic…and she was on the defence team!

James Shaw has said he was mistaken about what he said at the speech to the NZ Institute of International Affairs:

Green Party co-leader James Shaw is taking responsibility for a speech he gave in May in which he mistakenly said that Golriz Ghahraman had worked as a prosecutor at UN tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

The admission is the latest in a week in which Ghahraman’s work history and how it has been presented is under intense scrutiny.

Ghahraman worked in the defence team as an unpaid intern at the Rwanda Tribunal for Joseph Nzirorera, who died before he could be convicted of genocide, and in a paid position representing pop singer Simon Bikindi, who was convicted for incitement to genocide.

At The Hague, she worked on the pre-trial defence of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, who was found guilty of crimes against humanity. She worked on the prosecution at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

But in the speech in May to the NZ Institute of International Affairs, Shaw heaped praise on Ghahraman, saying that she had worked as a prosecutor at the Rwanda Tribunal and The Hague.

“Having fled Iran in 1990 as a child, Golriz is now a human rights lawyer who worked as a prosecutor at the United Nations’ tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. She also worked on the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia,” Shaw said.

This morning Shaw said he made a mistake and had not run the speech by Ghahraman.

“I didn’t check the speech with Golriz before I gave it. Clearly I got those the wrong way around.”

He got it the “wrong way around” twice. What sort of an idiot does he think we are, to make the same mistake a minimum of twice.

We now have a situation where the leader of the Green party has made some pretty serious mistakes about the credentials of one of his candidates. I simply don’t believe he made a mistake…twice. He’s either lying and was in on the CV embellishment, or he was being lied to.

I’ll be generous and accept he wasn’t lying, but the way he is behaving in sticking up for her makes me wonder if Golriz has him by the short and curlies somehow.

Given the numeous provable falsehoods from Golriz Gharhaman, I believe that James Shaw has been lied to.

I think we are now at the point where the considerable damage being done to the Green party now means that they hold the mantle of the most unethical party in parliament.

Credit: Luke

Barry Soper sniffs something whiffy:

The Greens have circled their wagons around their latest MP to land herself in the fudge factory.

It seems the deeper the hole being dug for our first refugee MP, Golriz Ghahraman, the more she keeps digging.

It was the same with Metiria Turei when she admitted to benefit fraud and went on to fudge the facts that, like an attack of borer, had the little bugs coming out of the woodwork.   

That is the problem. It is obfuscation, justification, without actually addressing the isssue, which was the hiding or at the very least economical versions of the truth that existed out there.

Few would take issue with Ghahraman, as a lawyer, joining a defence team representing those accused of genocide in Rwanda where around 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered.

But most would take exception to how the Greens represented her on their website, describing her as putting on trial world leaders for abusing their power and restoring communities after war and human rights atrocities. In reality she was a bit player.

In her interview with the Herald that stirred up the hornets’ nest she said she met a defence lawyer working for the Rwandan Tribunal and he invited her over saying they needed a lawyer at the coalface. She volunteered as an intern and now conveniently can’t remember whether she was assigned to one side or the other!

In the latest batch of fudge delivered she was asked whether she’d ever posed with a war criminal, she stammered before saying, no, but admitting to a defence photo with her team in court, saying everybody did. She said it’d be bizarre to say you’d go off as an intern and refuse to sit with you team in a photo.

How could she deny the photo, it was on her private Facebook page, and strangely it has now disappeared. Too late we harvested the lot.

Well a series of photos have been sent to me, one showing her posing alone with a former pop singer called Simon Bikindi who was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to 15 years in jail for incitement to commit genocide. He was found guilty after exhorting, over a public address system, his fellow Hutus to exterminate all the Tutsis whom he referred to as snakes.

Confronted with the photo she now says her commitment’s innocent until proven guilty but she can understand how the photo could be seen by some as jarring. But being involved in the process, she insisted, she wasn’t going to go down the rabbit hole and treat him as a lesser human being and he deserved a fair trial.

That is just too trite. Never before have I seen lowly clerks pose for selfies with their scumbag clients.

Other photos showed her on a United Nations private jet, another sitting with a UN investigator and a prosecution intern at a cafe, extolling the virtues of the Guinness brewed in Rwanda.

Trying to get her to discuss the photos wasn’t easy. She initially agreed, before the lead Greens wagon occupied by a spin doctor intervened insisting on the information being flicked though to her first. When the offer was declined she simply said, okay, we’ll just leave it then.

But a few hours later they had a change of heart, at least that’s a step in the right direction.

There is plenty more to come.

At a press conference, on October 7 2017, with James Shaw and other Green party MPs on the day that Golriz Gharhaman was elected to parliament she stated:

“I used to put genocidaires and war criminals on trial”

That busts her totally on her claims that before and since the election she had been totally upfront with Kiwi voters about her past.

That statement is an abject lie. She did no such thing. Firstly, she wasn’t in a position to put them on trial. Secondly in Rwanda and in The Hague she was defending genociaires and war criminals, not putting them on trial. Thirdly, she is inflating her own abilities, skills and actual involvement in those trials.

She then says later that:

“That really speaks to the Green party’s and NZ’s values”

Really? The Green party’s values? What are those?

She is an unethical Green who doesn’t know right from wrong.

She also stated:

“My dream has come from standing up for the most vulnerable”

Yeah because the guys she was defending on genocide charges and war crimes allegations were truly vulnerable. If she had in fact come from standing up for the vulnerable she would have been in Rwanda and The Hague putting these genocidal maniacs away, not defending them. If she truly was for the vulnerable she would have not defended a genocidal maniac who was fighting extradition back to Rwanda to face justice.

She has not stood up for the vulnerable, she has stood up for the powerful, murdering, killers. What she did for the vulnerable was to diminish crimes, excuse genocide, and obfuscate in court and delay. That isn’t standing up for the vulnerable victims, that is stomping all over their already considerable suffering.

After Metiria Turei’s fall from grace and now the ongoing lies and obfuscations from Golriz Gharhaman it is apparent that the Green party is the most unethical party in parliament. They simply cannot tell right from wrong.

She and her defenders are a piece of work. They won’t work with National, but they will work with war criminals.

Phil Quin asked on Twitter:

Well, a search of published judgments shows that yes, indeed, Golriz Gharhaman was involved in the defence of an alleged Rwandan war criminal who was seeking to have his deportation order overturned.

A Rwandan living in New Zealand, and suspected of being involved in genocide in the 1990s, is trying to secure confidentiality for witnesses in his defence.

The man, who cannot be identified, denies the allegations, and says his immigration approval should not be cancelled.

So far there has been no attempt to extradite or deport him, but he has been told his status is being reconsidered.

The Court of Appeal in Wellington was told on Thursday that, as part of that reconsideration, he wants New Zealand authorities to see the 35 witness statements he has.

However, nearly 20 of those are from witnesses who gave statements only on condition they not be shown to Rwandan authorities, the man’s lawyer, Grant Illingworth, QC, said.

The man wants an undertaking from New Zealand immigration authorities that it will not disclose the confidential statements.

The court has reserved its decision on how the statements should be treated.

Isn’t it amazing that she only seems to defend those accused of war crimes in Rwanda, and never works for the victims. This time it was in NZ.

There are two judgments regarding this suspected war criminal. The first is the High Court judgment where the ratbag was seeking to get all the information of those witnesses who support him seen and withheld from Rwandan authorities who are seeking to prosecute him. He lost that and then appealed and lost that too.

It appears though that there may well be another suspected war criminal she defended in NZ. The NZ Law Society wrote about Ghahraman on November 7 2017, just a few weeks ago.

She has also been acting for two Rwandans living in New Zealand who are being sought for extradition. The allegations relate to the brutal tribal war in 1994.

“Things are very different in Rwanda now, it’s a very repressive military dictatorship, so genocide accusations especially against political dissidents are very common and that is happening around the world, and that may well be what is happening here.”

So, it appears she is on the side of Hutu criminals, and has not a care or a thought for the victims of their violence. In this case, She has acted, in contrast to her previous claims about protecting human rights and holding the powerful to account, she was trying to prevent this accused war criminal being extradited to face charges levelled in the tribunal. She was actively defending an alleged war criminal, in NZ, to prevent him actually being held to account.

It seems her ethics around human rights are rather elastic. Phil Quin notes the elasticity:

View image on Twitter

Phil Quin@philquin

Which NZ lawyer told this load of rubbish — straight from the genocide denier’s hymn sheet — in an attempt to stop a war criminal from being extradited to face his accusers, while comparing 1994 Rwanda favorably to today?

5:48 PM – Nov 28, 2017

•  66 Replies

•  1414 Retweets

•  2222 likes

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When will the Greens stop defending this woman, who is at best economical with the truth, at worst a lying defender of war criminals.

What the Greens don’t understand is that their circle jerk of virtue signalling tweeters don’t represent reality. Voters don’t think like lawyers, much less like so-called human rights lawyers. They think that these bastards should have been strung up not given a fair trial, and they really hate the lawyers, especially gobby attention seeking lawyers.

I think it is time she went.

-NZ Law Society, Fairfax, research by Sally

During her maiden speech, Golriz Ghahraman said:

This was just the backdrop to a bloody war we fought against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I remember the bombs, the sirens, running to the basement. Waiting. Mostly I remember the kids, my age, who stopped speaking because of shell shock.

You can well imagine if you were close to constant combat, or under rocket attack constantly that this may well occur. Israeli children often suffer such distress living under constant Arab rocket fire from Gaza.

The Iran- Iraq war was a particularly vicious affair, including the use of poison gas, chemical weapons, artillery and rocket fire, not to mention massed infantry attacks. It lasted eight years and killed several hundred thousand people. It was a terrible conflict. Wikipedia states that there were 100,000+ casualties on both sides of the war.

Fairfax reported that:

Ghahraman was nine when her family fled their home town of Mashhad in the post Iran-Iraq War.  

This is where things become interesting. The Iran-Iraq War was actually a rather confined affair. As you can see from the map below the fighting was confined to the immediate border area, and in particular in the southern border area immediately north of Basra.

So where is Mashhad in relation to this eight-year border war?

Is it near the border with Iraq, where the gassing, chemical weapons, bombing and missiles occurred?

The answer is no. If I used the map above I couldn’t actually show you where the location of Mashhad is because it is near the border of Turkmenistan and it would be under the key block in the top right-hand corner, the furthest possible distance in Iran that you could get to be away from the war zone. It is, in fact, 1,600kms away from the combat zones.

Perhaps she is as confused about this as she is about whether or not she was a defence or a prosecuting lawyer in war crimes tribunals? I mean she was very young at the time, and before she embarked on a journey just two years after the war ended in 1990 in which her whole family managed to get permission to travel from Tehran to Kuala Lumpur to Auckland and supposedly on to Fiji. I imagine it must have cost a considerable amount of her family’s savings to buy such expensive long-range tickets for a little holiday in Fiji at a time when a) airfares were horrendously expensive, and b) the Iranian economy was in tatters after an expensive and debilitating eight-year war.

But I digress.

During a Radio NZ profile, it quotes her as saying she was born in Mashhad. This is interesting because in order for her to claim she was bombed and shelled and witnessed shell-shocked children her family would have had to move almost 1600km CLOSER to the combat zone than where she was born.

Of course, Mashhad may have been bombed at some point. I checked Wikipedia for the City, and it seems there was some bombing of Mashhad…in 1912…at a shrine…where several people and pilgrims were killed. But it was Russia who bombed Mashhad back in 1912, long before her parents were even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes. There was another bombing in 1994, when Golriz Gharhaman was 13 years old. Perhaps it was this bombing that caused her to see shellshocked children and suffer bombs and rockets?

Well, no. Because by 1994 she was in New Zealand as an asylum seeker with her parents, and the bombing took place at a shrine which killed 25 people.

There simply is no record of her birthplace ever being involved in the Iran-Iraq war. It was simply too far away from the border areas.

Source/ Kiwiblog

So, Mashhad has only ever been bombed twice, once in 1912 and again in 1994. She wasn’t born in 1912 and wasn’t in Mashhad in 1994.

I have now reached the point where I cannot believe a word this woman says. Not a single thing she says stacks up.

What makes matters somewhat problematic for her now is that she made her claims in Parliament. There is now prima facie evidence that she misled parliament. Unfortunately, that requires a member to lay a Privileges Committee complain, but National seems rather squeamish in saying anything much at all about the apparent mis-speaking of Golriz Gharhaman. It is a serious matter to mislead parliament, surely some honourable member might like to take some action?

Now to potential weapons systems, even though we know none were ever fired at much less hit Mashhad.

It can’t have been FROG or SCUD missiles, their maximum range is only 800km. They wouldn’t have even reached Tehran and only about halfway to Mashhad. None of Iraq’s ballistic missiles, either liquid or solid fuel had anywhere near the range to be able bomb Mashhad. Artillery has a range at best of 50km.

That only leaves air delivery, or aircraft which could have bombed her…could it have been that even though we know Mashhad was never attacked, ever, during the Iran-Iraq War? They had Mirage F1, Su-20, Mig-21 and Mig-23, Mig-25, Tu-16, Tu-22, and French Super Etendards. Only the Tu-22 has sufficient combat radius to mount an air strike on Mashhad. But they would have had to fly a roundabout route to avoid anti-aircraft countermeasures as they crossed the entire country of Iran to deliver these bombs which never landed so that Golriz Gharhaman could have her recollections of bombs and shells landing causing children to be shell-shocked.

Unless she lived elsewhere, but surely she would have said that?

Or she is a big fat liar. In which case she has misled the House.