Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman denies she has misled the country about her work as a defence lawyer at war crimes tribunals in Rwanda.
Former Labour staffer Phil Quin, who has lived and worked in Rwanda, sent a series of tweets saying Ms Ghahraman should resign, claiming she is a genocide denier.
- Golriz Ghahraman denies work defending war criminals was 'hidden'
- Poll: Do you think Golriz Ghahraman and the Green Party have misled the public?
But the first refugee MP in New Zealand told the AM Show she's never denied her law work for the United Nations before.
"I did a number of interviews before the election where I talked about this. I went around various law schools, I've talked about this in the past. My CV was online and completely open.
"There's just this one line that people have gotten a hold of and I would suggest if the Green party was trying to hide this someone would have called me up and said you've got to stop doing Herald articles about it."
After discovering her profile on the Green Party website failed to explicitly mention her work as part of the defence teams, she says it was changed immediately.
Before being changed, it read: "Golriz has lived and worked in Africa, The Hague and Cambodia putting on trial world leaders for abusing their power, and restoring communities after war and human rights atrocities."
Ms Ghahraman told Newshub she did a three-month internship on the defence team for the trial of Joseph Nzirorera in Rwanda, who died before he could be convicted of genocide. She said she also worked on the appeals case for Simon Bikindi, who was convicted of using songs to incite the 1994 genocide.
Ms Ghahraman says having a fair defence stops the cycle of violence.
"Those trials are about the defence being there as well, otherwise we wouldn't have trials - we'd take them out the back.
"Having the defence ensures that.
"It's not the prosecutors putting them on trial - it's the entire justice system.
"I don't want us to resort back to, we take people out back and shoot them.
"We're going to put [criminals] into a fair process. The community gets to see exactly who's responsible."
Ms Ghahraman says she's "really proud" of her work in Rwanda - and would be regardless of which side she represented.
"I certainly don't have any moral, ethical choice - as does no lawyer that works on criminal trials in terms of working for either side.
"It's really hard to act on the defence in those trials but you've got to be really committed to that human rights-based process.
"You're there to make the process fair. So to say that there's a moral problem, to suggest that all of these United Nations lawyers, where the UN requires that there's a defence and a prosecution are somehow morally repugnant, is actually offensive to be honest.
"We want to know exactly who did what, we want it to be transparent we want the evidence to be tested and the historical record to be set right."
Newshub.
