New Zealand - November 2024

New Zealand’s parliament unanimously passed the Citizenship Western Samoa Restoration Amendment Bill, which provides a path to regain New Zealand citizenship for Samoans who were stripped of it by a 1982 act of parliament. New Zealand administered Samoa between 1920 and 1961 under an international mandate. In 1982, the Privy Council ruled that Western Samoans born between 1924 and 1948 were British subjects and that from 1 January 1949 they and their descendants had become New Zealand citizens. The 1982 legislation overruled this decision and denied citizenship to a wide category of Samoan people in New Zealand. Samoans born between 1924 and 1948 who were present in New Zealand in 1982 may now apply to regain New Zealand Citizenship. To regain it, those affected must now apply and prove they were present in the country in 1982. Representatives of the Samoan community praised the law, the result of decades of activist pressure, for partially righting a historical wrong, but criticized it for not benefitting descendants of those affected or completely overturning the 1982 act of parliament.

Sources: Pacific Islands Times, New Zealand Herald 

The New Zealand government introduced a bill to ‘reinterpret’ the country’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed between more than 500 Maori chiefs and the British Crown in 1840. The introduction of the bill came at the behest of a junior partner of the governing coalition, the ACT New Zealand party, which argues the Treaty unfairly privileges Maori people and has drafted the bill as means of granting parliament the power to legally reinterpret the treaty. The rest of the governing coalition has agreed to support ACT in initial votes on the bill but will not support it becoming law. The bill’s introduction has been met with large nationwide protests and parliamentary sessions have been twice disrupted by opposition MPs. Legal experts, including members of the ruling National Party, say that the introduction of the bill, which likely will not pass, will nonetheless damage relations between the party and the Maori community, and expect debates and public discussion to be fraught and exacerbate existing social divisions with unpredictable consequences. 

Sources: Reuters, Radio New Zealand, Public Services International