KEY POINTS:
Predictably, the talkback lines were full of sound and fury in the wake of the SIS decision to withdraw the security risk certificate against Ahmed Zaoui. His delighted supporters called on the country to welcome him - and for his wife and four boys to join him.
His
lawyer, Deborah Manning, has done a remarkable job. The money that has been spent on legal aid doesn't begin to cover the time she and her team have spent on the case, and she will be glad there has been a resolution.
The Government must be enormously relieved, too. In different times, had Labour been the opposition when Zaoui was jailed, Helen Clark and Phil Goff would have been outside Paremoremo prison demanding his immediate release.
And there has been praise for the SIS, too, for calling a press conference for the first time in its shadowy existence and outlining the reasons Zaoui was considered a threat to national security and the reasons he's now considered to be rehabilitated.
Certainly, you can understand the SIS looking carefully into Zaoui's background. He had been biffed out of Belgium, France and Switzerland, and Britain didn't want him. He must be the unluckiest man in the world, given the number of times and the number of countries in which he has been arrested, charged and/or expelled.
The normally tolerant Swiss sent the Zaoui family off to Burkina Farso, paying the small African country a stipend for their trouble.
But Zaoui didn't find Burkina Farso to his liking. Too poor, too uneducated. He doesn't like countries with Muslim governments either, because he believes in democracy and wants to live in a country with a strong record on human rights and a small Muslim community.
New Zealand, then, will suit him down to the ground. I have no snitch against this man. He seems pleasant and has managed to gather around him a large number of people who believe in him and the rightness of his cause.
Most importantly, the Refugee Status Appeals Authority believes in him. The authority is not a soft touch. In 2003, of the slightly more than 2000 decisions reached, only 20 per cent of applicants were granted refugee status. So Zaoui appears to have a genuine case.
But I return to the point Winston Peters makes - he's a queue jumper who is an economic refugee, not a political one.
His family appears to have been living safely and happily in Malaysia for the past four years while Zaoui has been fighting his corner - what's wrong with making Malaysia his home?
And what of all those refugees festering in squalid camps, whose lives are in real danger through disease and violence?
There are more than 32 million refugees, asylum seekers and displaced persons around the world. In our own Asian and Oceanic region, more than 15 million people are looking for a home. Most of them don't have the money to jump on a plane, drop off their family in a safe haven, then make their way to a sanctuary at the end of the world.
Obviously, we can't take them all so should we just take the ones who have the money and chutzpah to circumvent the official process? Zaoui is here now so we'll just have to keep him and his wife and kids. Everyone's glad the case is closed. Now we just have to see whether the public can get over it.
