Wellington, New Zealand –
In the midst of pandemic restrictions, thousands of New Zealanders, desperate to return home, essentially had to roll the dice month after month as they tried to secure a coveted bed in a quarantine hotel run by the military.
A New Zealand court ruled on Wednesday that the government had violated the rights of its own citizens by imposing a lottery-like system on them.
A group called Grounded Kiwis used crowdsourcing to help fund its lawsuit against the government.
But as they celebrated their victory, the case may have little impact in the future, as New Zealand has since abandoned its zero-tolerance approach to the virus and largely dismantled its controversial quarantine system.
Central to the case was the New Zealand Bill of Rights, which guarantees every citizen the right to return home.
Supreme Court Justice Gillian Malone ruled that forcing people to stay in quarantined hotels initially for two weeks and then for a week was reasonable given the circumstances of the pandemic.
But she found that using the lottery bed system was unwise and did not take into account how long people had been waiting abroad or whether they had an overwhelming need to return home.
“The right of New Zealanders to enter their country may be violated in some cases in a way that is not clearly justified in a free and democratic society,” the judge concluded.
Deficiencies in the system were highlighted earlier this year in the case of Charlotte Bellis, a pregnant New Zealand journalist who was temporarily blocked in Afghanistan due to New Zealand’s strict border policy.
The case quickly became a disgrace to the New Zealand government, which backed down and offered Belis a way home, which she accepted.
Paul Radic, a lawyer representing Grounded Kiwis, said he was “pleased” with the decision, which came as an excuse for people who have had great difficulty returning home.
Opposition lawmaker Chris Bishop said the government’s system of managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) had caused great suffering.
“We now have judicial confirmation of state-sponsored atrocity, which was the MIQ lottery,” Bishop said.
“Pregnant women like journalist Charlotte Bellis have been denied MIQ vouchers for entering New Zealand,” Bishop said. “People couldn’t come back to be with loved ones in the last stage of their lives.”
But COVID-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the court had confirmed that the MIQ system was legal and justified. He said he acknowledged that the court had found that the rights of some citizens may have been violated by the bed lottery system.
“We have long recognized the difficult trade-offs we had to make in our response to COVID-19 to save lives, and the effects of these decisions on all New Zealanders, especially those living abroad,” Hipkins said.
The lawsuit specifically examined the so-called virtual lobby system, which was essentially a government-run quarantine lottery, as it operated between early September and mid-December 2021.
New Zealand’s approach to the pandemic has changed significantly over time, leading to the dismantling of the quarantine system this year.
Until last October, the nation of 5 million followed a zero-tolerance approach as the government, led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, sought to eliminate the virus altogether.
This gave way to a strategy of suppression during the Delta option outbreak, and then something close to being adopted as the focus of the Omicron option proved impossible to control.
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