by Cameron Slater on December 1, 2017 at 8:00am

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.