Abstract
China human rights experts have responded with scepticism to a “troubling precedent” handed down by the New Zealand Supreme Court in June (Donald Clarke “New Zealand’s Troubling Precedent for China Extradition”, Lawfare, 15 June 2021; Michael Caster “To the Supreme Court: Diplomatic Assurances from China are Meaningless” Stuff.co.nz (online ed, 12 June 2021). The decision, Minister of Justice v Kim [2021] NZSC 57, concerns Kyung Yup Kim — a South Korean citizen who moved to Aotearoa at the age of fourteen, more than thirty years ago. Kim is wanted on a murder charge in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a capital offence in China; he is accused of killing Ms Peiyun Chen in Shanghai in 2009. New Zealand received an extradition request from the PRC in 2011, which included assurances that Kim would not be subject to the death penalty if convicted. The Minister of Justice has twice determined that Kim should be surrendered for extradition to the PRC under the Extradition Act 1999, but repeated legal challenges have so far prevented this step from taking place. Most recently, in 2019 the Court of Appeal had held that the Minister of Justice made multiple errors in assessing whether Kim could lawfully be surrendered (Kim v Minister of Justice [2019] NZCA 209; [2019] 3 NZLR 173; see Marcelo Rodriguez-Ferrere and Andrew Geddis “The New Zealand Court of Appeal on Extradition to the PRC”, UK Constitutional Law Blog, 24 June 2019). Notably, that decision was handed down by a bench that included Winkelmann CJ and Williams J, both of whom subsequently have been elevated to the Supreme Court (but, for obvious reasons, could not then sit on the current appeal).