Court stops Rainbow Warrior video

Plans for TVNZ to show extended video footage of guilty pleas by the Rainbow Warrior saboteurs were scuppered yesterday after the Court of Appeal ordered a stay on its own ruling allowing broadcast.

On Monday, TVNZ was celebrating a victory after the court allowed it to broadcast footage of Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur's guilty pleas for the manslaughter of photographer Fernando Pereira during the 1985 Rainbow Warrior bombing.

Lawyers for the French spies argued they never approved the closed-circuit television footage being kept as a permanent record, and its screening would compromise their privacy.

Some of the footage was screened on TV One on Monday night with the promise of extended coverage in the Sunday programme.

But yesterday, the three Appeal Court justices allowed a stay of the judgment for two weeks.

TVNZ lawyer William Akel said this meant the footage would not be screened this weekend. Extracts from the video were to be immediately withdrawn from TVNZ's website.

- NZPA