Guilty pleas under duress, says Christchurch shooter

Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people in an attack on two Christchurch mosques in March 2019, has filed complaints alleging that his treatment in New Zealand custody constituted a violation of his human rights, and that his guilty pleas were obtained under duress.

The Australian national was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in August 2020.

Following the attacks, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern vowed she would never say the attacker’s name, and many other government bodies followed her lead. Tarrant’s lawyer Tony Ellis writes that the chief coroner’s refusal to use Tarrant’s name – instead referring to him repeatedly as ‘the individual’, was a serious breach of human rights and an attempt render the offender a ‘non-person’, failed to provide him equal protection and equal treatment before the law and was ‘deeply offensive and unlawful’.

In both the royal commission’s full report into the attack and the coroner’s 47-page scope of inquiry, the terrorist is never referred to by name, only as ‘the individual’.

Imam Gamal Fouda, the imam of one of the mosques at the centre of the attacks, said the terrorist was ‘grandstanding’ and attempting to further traumatise the families of those who he killed.