A bid by a National backbench MP to make it illegal for paedophiles to change their names has been rejected.
Jian Yang’s private member’s bill would have made child sex offenders ineligible to register a new name, and was designed to make it more difficult for them to reoffend.
It was found to be inconsistent with the right to freedom of expression, and Ministry of Justice officials warned that it would have little effect on minimising harm from paedophiles while possibly harming their attempts at rehabilitation.
In a report released last week, Parliament’s social services committee said that the bill should not be passed into law.
Committee chairman and National MP Alfred Ngaro said an alternative solution had been found which did not raise the same human rights concerns.
Curious that a child sex offender’s Rights to Freedom of Expression can not be curtailed by preventing a name change. Changing your name is already curtailed. You can’t call yourself Fucky McFuckface, for example. So, I’m not sure where the Ministry of Justice draws the line.
The Ministry of Justice’s legal advisers said that the law change could also hinder an offender’s rehabilitation or reintegration into society, in particular offenders who were victims of child abuse themselves.
They warned that the bill would have had a “negligible” effect because there was no legal requirement to register a name to use it.
A person was not legally obliged to provide their registered name or any other information unless it was specifically stated in law.
Therefore, the bill would not have prevented paedophiles from committing identity fraud or from falsely using another person’s name.
A drafting error meant that the law change had a very wide scope and would have captured not only sex offenders but also some violent offenders.
When people get imprisoned they lose all sorts of rights as a consequence. I still can’t see why stopping sex offenders from hiding under another name is anything but a sensible move.
– NZ Herald
