“We’ve learned that the world is watching,” writes lawyer Roimata Smail (second from right) about government discrimination against Māori. She’s pictured with Lady Tureiti Moxon and others in Geneva this week. (Photo supplied)

Health leader Lady Tureiti Moxon headed to the UN in Geneva this week, as part of a collective of civil society, to present a claim that the government has escalated discrimination against Māori during its term and is overriding constitutional norms. 

The evidence was presented to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in the early hours of Tuesday, NZ time.

Here’s lawyer Roimata Smail on how the trip unfolded.

We travelled for 27 hours to Geneva. Apparently, New Zealand is the furthest point in the world from Switzerland. We stepped out into zero degrees.

After a day to acclimatise, we turned up at Palais Wilson, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the leading UN entity for human rights, is based.

Inside the Palais Wilson, it was quiet. The building used to be a hotel, and it’s grand with marble floors and a sweeping staircase. But the UN has had funding cuts, and you could feel it in the silence. We waited in a large room with high ceilings and French doors looking over the lake.

With us were Tina Ngata and rangatahi from the Pou Tikanga of the National Iwi Chairs Forum, and Donna Cormack from RIRI (Research to Interrupt Racism and (In)equity). We were there because the government’s actions targeting Māori have escalated to the point that urgent intervention is needed.

We’d been told that the first meeting with the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which monitors whether governments are keeping their promises under the International Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, would be “informal”. It was not.

We walked into a large committee room with desks in rows, double-height wooden walls, a UN flag, interpreters behind glass, and microphones and headsets for everyone. A screen at the front showed a three-minute timer for each speaker. Lady Tureiti Moxon, Tina, and Donna had their three minutes, and then the Committee asked them questions all at once. They answered clearly. The whole meeting took less than an hour.

Claire Charters from Auckland University arrived later in the day, and we tried to coordinate across WhatsApp and a couple of quick café meetings as jetlag allowed. All of us had been waking between 1am and 4am and not getting back to sleep. We were only in Geneva for five nights, and the tiredness never really lifted. Even so, we kept working.

The CERD review session for New Zealand would open early on Wednesday morning, and New Zealand government representatives would be required to respond to questions from committee members. We wanted to help CERD identify the areas where the government’s presentation would be misleading and where extra questioning might be helpful. The pace to prepare for this session was intense.

The next day, we had a second meeting with the two country rapporteurs, Stamatia Stavrinaki from Greece and Gün Kut from Turkey, as well as Gay McDougall, a law professor from the US who has taken a strong interest in what’s happening in Aotearoa.

There were the 12 of us who’d travelled from Aotearoa, and another six at home joining the meeting remotely. This time, we had only 40 minutes to make our case.

Straight after this meeting, the first of two formal three-hour sessions between CERD and the New Zealand government began.

The atmosphere was polite, very similar to what I’m used to as a lawyer in the Waitangi Tribunal. The government gave its opening statement. It mattered to me that there were 12 of us in the room, sitting together in solidarity — just as many as the 12 representatives sent by the government. Sitting behind us were Cree from Canada, African UN Fellows from around the world, and others who gave us words of encouragement.

Still, everything felt rushed. I worried that we might have come all this way for CERD to still not understand how serious the situation is for Māori in Aotearoa. CERD only meets like this to consider New Zealand every eight years, and maybe we’d missed our chance.

But as soon as the Committee began its questions, I knew we were in the right place at the right time. The questioning was fast, direct, and showed they understood the situation in detail.

It was emotional to hear the CERD members — speaking in Greek, Turkish, American, and Chinese accents, and in French — raise concerns about the rapid regression in Aotearoa for Māori.

It was also good to hear members push back, very politely, on some of the government’s assertions.

For example, when Minister Paul Goldsmith justified the lack of government action on hate speech by saying the best antidote to hate speech is “more speech”, Member Kut was firm in saying that this position does not meet international norms. He reminded the government that it has a responsibility to protect citizens, minorities, and Indigenous peoples from hate speech, and that hate speech leads to hate crimes.

When Goldsmith talked about “all New Zealanders”, several CERD members also reminded him that under international convention, the New Zealand government has a particular responsibility to Indigenous Māori, given the harm done to Māori over many generations.

The government continued to give selective and misleading statements across both sessions. But because we were there, we could provide written responses after each session to correct the record. We wrote these in the middle of the night when the jetlag woke us up.

One moment from the session will stay with me. Member Nourredine Amir from Algeria spoke only once. He is 85 years old and has served on CERD for 25 years. He wore his outdoor jacket to stay warm during the meeting. He said this session would be his last.

He recalled being invited to New Zealand by Māori many years ago, and it was clear he regretted never taking up the invitation. He said he remembered hearing Māori called alcoholics and that Māori children were trapped in places where they were abused.

He asked whether anything had truly changed. He said he hoped New Zealand would invite a CERD member to see for themselves how the Māori live and to hear from the children who were abused, who are adults now with memories that will stay with them forever. He said in human terms it would be the right thing to do to recognise the mistakes of the past, and that such crimes should never go unpunished.

The government delegation did not respond to anything he said.

But his comments mattered to us. The children taken from their families by the state were overwhelmingly Māori children. They were horrifically abused by the government. The impacts of that have been felt not just by individuals, but society — for example, in the birth of gangs as those children banded together for safety.

And there has still been no punishment for the government’s crimes against our tamariki.

Instead, the prime minister’s apology to survivors of abuse in state care was immediately followed by new bootcamps, where history shows we can expect mostly Māori children to suffer harm.

Of the children Oranga Tamariki still takes into state care, most are Māori, and we know many are still being abused.

The government delegation told CERD there is a compensation package of over $500 million for survivors of abuse in state care. But they failed to say that only $289 million of that is earmarked as financial redress and targeted support for survivors. The rest will be funnelled back into the system itself — as “investments in the wider care system” — the same structures which continue to take and abuse children who are overwhelmingly Māori.

It’s been a hard two years. We may not feel aroha from our government, but we’ve taken heart from this trip.

We’ve learned that the world is watching, and there is aroha in the world for Māori and Māori children.

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination will publish its findings and recommendations for New Zealand before the end of its 116th session, which concludes on December 5.

Roimata Smail (Ngāti Maniapoto, Tainui, England, Scotland, Ireland) is a lawyer specialising in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. She represented lead claimants in the Waitangi Tribunal inquiry that led to the watershed Hauora Report and the establishment of Te Aka Whai Ora, the Māori Health Authority.

E-Tangata, 2025