So very wrong

Phil Kitchin at Stuff writes:

Two victims of a serial paedophile fighting to keep his name secret will ask a judge to lift suppression of their names, as they join a legal battle to prevent the man getting compensation for an alleged privacy breach.

The women are furious that taxpayers will fund the Office of Human Rights Proceedings’ prosecution of the Sensible Sentencing Trust for revealing the predator’s name – but it won’t fund a lawyer to represent them.

One victim said she and fellow taxpayers were paying for a paedophile to continue “the abuse”, because he still denied his guilt, despite his multiple sex convictions.

It beggared belief that an independent office from within the Human Rights Commission was fighting to protect his privacy – and wanted him compensated – when no court record existed of him having final name suppression, the women said.

“He robbed me of my childhood and murdered my innocence,” one of them told The Dominion Post.

They believed the man was “cowardly” for trying to keep his name secret, saying paedophiles who did not admit their crimes usually reoffended, and there could be other victims who had not spoken to police.

“Robbers and murderers don’t get name suppression, so it’s just as important that these people are stopped,” one victim said. “He has no privacy – he gave up his right to privacy when he abused innocent young girls and was convicted in a court of law.”

The paedophile – who was earning about $150,000 a year in a chief executive role until he was outed – said in a sworn statement that he did not commit the crimes for which he was convicted in the mid-1990s and sentenced to a year’s jail.

If there is no court record of name suppression, I do not see how one can just assume the man had name suppression, and hence assume that the sensible Sentencing Trust have breached his privacy.