Chambers on Kim Dotcom

Deborah Chambers QC reviews the Dotcom extradition saga:

The Kim Dotcom saga should be a source of deep shame to New Zealanders. To successive governments who failed to fix the legislation. To our courts. And to every New Zealander who believes this country can run a competent extradition system.

Fourteen years. That is how long it has taken – and counting – to get a man arrested in a high-profile raid in January 2012 to the point where he might finally be put on a plane to face the music in the United States. 

It should take 12 – 18 months max.

A better approach would be for the relevant Minister to decide both eligibility and whether the person is to be extradited, with the legislation providing only for limited judicial review to safeguard against a Minister going seriously wrong. 

This would be a vast improvement.

On top of all this sits the character of the man New Zealand has hosted for so long. During his years in the Queenstown area his online output increasingly featured material that critics have described as antisemitic. In August 2024 he posted a lengthy thread extensively quoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious antisemitic forgery, and presented it as an explanation for current world events, while denying he was antisemitic. Earlier, in 2015, he tweeted that US actions reminded him of Nazi Germany and added that it was “ironic” Hollywood was “run by mostly Jewish entrepreneurs”. In 2014 he confirmed ownership of a rare, signed copy of Mein Kampf, drawing sharp criticism from the New Zealand Jewish Council. These are not obscure footnotes. They are part of the public record of the man who has consumed so much of our legal system’s time and resources.

There can be no doubt that Dotcom is anti-semitic.