However, some can be limited in how much they can hold people accountable.
The Human Rights Review Tribunal is one of the few in New Zealand that can award damages – up to $250,000.
Open Justice reporter Jeremy Wilkinson told The Front Page there are several avenues to get your case to this tribunal.
“There are three paths that can get you there. Each through a different commissioner. You can go through the Health and Disability, Privacy or Human Rights Commissioners. They don’t need to make a favourable finding in your case for you to go up a level, so to speak, to get to the Human Rights Review Tribunal.
“The Privacy Commissioner’s rulings, for the most part, funnily enough, are private. They publish some of their rulings every year, but they’re mostly anonymised.
“We did have a woman contact us with an active complaint. She was at a bar in Wellington, met a guy and they hooked up. But it was on CCTV. One of the staff members at the bar was watching, filmed it on their phone and sent it to the man’s partner. His partner then came in and assaulted the woman. So, she took the bar to the Privacy Commissioner on the basis that they filmed the CCTV and distributed it,” he said.
Wilkinson also recalled another case involving a man named Stephen Butcher.
“He objected to his photo being used on his driver’s licence because it was his interpretation that when you encode a photograph digitally, it turns into a series of zeros and ones, and those zeros and ones could spell out 666 – or, the ‘mark of the beast’, and that went against his Christian religion.
“That was a pretty wild case where they flew up a historian from Dunedin to give expert evidence on this thousand-year-old piece of papyrus that Stephen Butcher presented as evidence. Suffice to say, he did not win that and he must have his photo on his driver’s licence if he wants to drive like everyone else in New Zealand,” he said.
Another person who has cropped up time and time again is a man named Taiming Zhang.
“He has had five rulings through the tribunal. Some of them have had more merit than others.
“He took Samsung’s New Zealand branch to the tribunal because his Chinese sim card wouldn’t work in his phone. He took Apple New Zealand sales to the tribunal because he claimed that his iPad’s voice function was racist. He tried to take the James Cook Hotel in Wellington to the tribunal as well when they gave him Coke Zero instead of Coke No Sugar, which was what was advertised on their menu.
“The tribunal has called many of his claims ‘frivolous’ but, they can’t stop him making the claims. And this is where that triaging from the other three commissioners comes into play,” he said.
It can take two years for a case to make its way through the tribunal.
“Some experts speculate that the various commissioners’ ability to not award damages means that people don’t feel that justice has been achieved at that lower level.
“The phrase that’s often touted is, ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’. When you are waiting four years, sometimes from claim to ruling, can probably feel like it’s not worth it.
“But then again, Malcolm King – he’s claustrophobic and was locked in a police cell. He waited four years for a decision. He said it was incredibly frustrating but at the end of the day he was represented for free by the director of Human Rights Proceedings and won $45,000,” he said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about the tribunal process and some of the stories that make it through the system.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
