Foreign News
Thousands flock to New Zealand capital in huge Māori protests
More than 40,000 people have protested outside New Zealand’s parliament against a proposed bill seeking to reinterpret the country’s founding document between British colonisers and Māori people.
Tuesday’s demonstration marked the end of a nine-day hīkoi, or peaceful protest, that had made its way through the country.
The hīkoi swelled to one of the biggest in the country’s history, with many participants draped in colours of the Māori flag, as they marched through the capital Wellington.
It easily dwarfed the 5,000-strong crowd that turned up for land rights in 1975, and double the size of another major hīkoi in 2004, which rallied for shore and sea ownership rights.
Tuesday’s march brought together activists and supporters who opposed the bill, which was introduced by a junior member of the governing coalition, the Act political party.
The Treaty Principles bill argues that New Zealand should reinterpret and legally define the principles of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, a document that is seen as fundamental to the country’s race relations.
The party’s leader, David Seymour, says that over time the treaty’s core values have led to racial divisions, not unity.
“My Treaty Principles Bill says that I, like everybody else, whether their ancestors came here a thousand years ago, like some of mine did, or just got off the plane at Auckland International Airport this morning to begin their journey as New Zealanders, have the same basic rights and dignity,” Seymour, who has Māori ancestry, told the BBC.
“Your starting point is to take a human being and ask, what’s your ancestry? What kind of human are you? That used to be called prejudice. It used to be called bigotry. It used to be called profiling and discrimination. Now you’re trying to make a virtue of it. I think that’s a big mistake.”
The proposed bill was met with fierce opposition, leading to one of the biggest protest marches New Zealand has ever seen.
Wellington’s rail network saw what might have been its busiest morning ever as the hīkoi poured through the capital, according to the city’s transport chair Thomas Nash.
The Māori Queen Ngā Wai hono i te pō led the delegation into the grounds surrounding the Beehive, New Zealand’s parliament house, as thousands followed behind.
Meanwhile, inside the Beehive, MPs discussed the bill.
Among them was Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who said it would not pass into law – despite him being part of the same coalition as Act.
“Our position as the National Party is unchanged. We won’t be supporting the bill beyond second reading and therefore it won’t become law,” Luxon said, according to the New Zealand Herald. “We don’t think through the stroke of a pen you go rewrite 184 years of debate and discussion.”
New Zealand is often considered a world leader when it comes to supporting indigenous rights – but under Luxon’s centre-right government, there are fears those rights are now at risk.
“They are trying to take our rights away,” Stan Lingman, who has both Māori and Swedish ancestry told the BBC. “The hikoi is for all New Zealanders – white, yellow, pink, blue. We will fight against this bill.”
Stan’s wife Pamela said she was marching for her “mokos”, which means grandchildren in the Māori language.
Other New Zealanders feel the march has gone too far.
“They [Māori] seem to want more and more and more,” said Barbara Lecomte, who lives in the coastal suburbs north of Wellington. “There’s a whole cosmopolitan mix of different nationalities now. We are all New Zealanders. I think we should work together and have equal rights.”
Equality, though, is still a way off, according to Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader of Te Pāti Māori (Maori Party).
“We can’t live equally if we have one people who are the indigenous people living ‘less than’,” she argued. What the coalition government is doing is “an absolute attempt to divide an otherwise progressive country and it’s really embarrassing”.
New Zealand’s parliament was brought to a temporary halt last week by MPs performing a haka, or traditional dance, in opposition to the bill. Footage of the incident went viral.
“To see it in parliament, in the highest house in Aotearoa, there’s been a real state of surprise and I think disappointment and sadness that in 2024 when we see politics and the Trump extremes, this is what the Māori are having to endure,” said Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. “It’s humiliating for the government because we [New Zealand] are normally seen as punching above our weight in all of the great things in life.”
Protest organisers on Monday taught participants the words and moves of the rally’s haka, the subject of which is Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Waitangi Treaty). Those in the audience enthusiastically repeated the lyrics written on a large white sheet, trying to soak in as many words as possible ahead of the rally.
“This isn’t just any normal hīkoi – this is the hīkoi of everybody,” said grandmother Rose Raharuhi Spicer, explaining that they’ve called on non-Māori, Pacific Islanders and the wider population in New Zealand to support them.
This was the fourth hīkoi Rose had been on. She comes from New Zealand’s northernmost settlement, Te Hāpua, right above Auckland. It’s the same village that the most famous hīkoi started from, back in 1975, protesting over land rights.
This time, she brought her children and grandchildren.
“This is our grandchildren’s legacy,” she said. “It’s not just one person or one party – and to alter [it] is wrong.”
[BBC]
A total of 1,557 Venezuelan political prisoners have applied for amnesty under a new law introduced on Thursday, the country’s National Assembly President has said.
Jorge Rodríguez, brother of Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodríguez and an ally of former President Nicolás Maduro, also said “hundreds” of prisoners had already been released.
Among them is politician Juan Pablo Guanipa, one of several opposition voices to have criticised the law for excluding certain prisoners.
The US has urged Venezuela to speed up its release of political prisoners since US forces seized Maduro in a raid on 3 January. Venezuela’s socialist government has always denied holding political prisoners.
At a news conference on Saturday Jorge Rodríguez said 1,557 release requests were being addressed “immediately” and ultimately the legislation would extend to 11,000 prisoners.
The government first announced days after Maduro’s capture, on 8 January, that “a significant number” of prisoners would be freed as a goodwill gesture.
Opposition and human rights groups have said the government under Maduro used detentions of political prisoners to stamp out dissent and silence critics for years.
These groups have also criticised the new law. One frequently cited criticism is that it would not extend amnesty to those who called for foreign armed intervention in Venezuela, BBC Latin America specialist Luis Fajardo says.
He noted that law professor Juan Carlos Apitz, of the Central University of Venezuela, told CNN Español that that part of the amnesty law “has a name and surname”. “That paragraph is the Maria Corina Machado paragraph.”
It is not clear if the amnesty would actually cover Machado, who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Fajardo said.
He added that other controversial aspects of the law include the apparent exclusion from amnesty benefits of dozens of military officers involved in rebellions against the Maduro administration over the years.
On Saturday, Rodríguez said it is “releases from Zona Seven of El Helicoide that they’re handling first”.
Those jailed at the infamous prison in Caracas would be released “over the next few hours”, he added.
Activists say some family members of those imprisoned in the facility have gone on hunger strike to demand the release of their relatives.
US President Donald Trump said that El Helicoide would be closed after Maduro’s capture.
Maduro is awaiting trial in custody in the US alongside his wife Cilia Flores and has pleaded not guilty to drugs and weapons charges, saying that he is a “prisoner of war”.
[BBC]
In the second half of the 19th Century, photography became one of the British Empire’s most persuasive instruments for knowing – and classifying – India.
A new exhibition – called Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855-1920, and organised by DAG, the Delhi-based art gallery – brings together nearly 200 rare photographs from a period when the camera was deployed to classify communities, fix identities and make India’s complex social differences legible to the colonial government.
Spanning 65 years, the exhibition maps an expansive human geography: from Lepcha and Bhutia communities in the north-east to Afridis in the north-west; from Todas in the Nilgiris to Parsi and Gujarati elites in western India.
It also turns its gaze to those assigned to the lower rungs of the colonial social order – dancing girls, agricultural labourers, barbers and snake charmers.
These images did not merely document India’s diversity; they actively shaped it, translating fluid, lived realities into apparently stable and knowable “types”.
Curated by historian Sudeshna Guha, the exhibition centres on folios from The People of India, the influential eight-volume photographic survey published between 1868 and 1875. From this core, it expands outward to include albumen and silver-gelatin prints by photographers such as Samuel Bourne, Lala Deen Dayal, John Burke and the studio Shepherd & Robertson – practitioners whose images helped define the visual language of that time.
“Taken together, this material tells the history of ethnographic photography and its effect on the British administration and the Indian population, in a project which in size and depth has never before been seen in India,” says Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG.
Here’s a selection of images from the exhibition:
[BBC]
A co-founder of online fashion giant Asos died after falling from a high-rise apartment block in Thailand, police have said.
Quentin Griffiths has been named by Thai police as the man found dead on the ground in the eastern seaside city of Pattaya on 9 February.
A police investigator told the BBC Griffiths, a British passport holder, was by himself, his room was locked from the inside, and there was no trace of any break-ins at the time of the death. An autopsy did not reveal any evidence of foul play.
Griffiths co-founded Asos in 2000 and remained a significant shareholder after leaving the firm five years later.
A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We are supporting the family of a British national who has died in Thailand and are in contact with the local authorities.”
Police in Pattaya told the BBC Griffiths was found dead outside a luxury hotel where he had been staying in as a long-term resident in a suite on the 17th floor.
He was involved in two ongoing court cases that might have caused him stress, police also told the BBC.
Griffiths was separated from his second wife, a Thai national, and had reportedly been engaged in a legal dispute with her over a business they ran together, the BBC understands.
He co-founded Asos in London with Nick Robertson, Andrew Regan and Deborah Thorpe.
Its name originally stood for As Seen On Screen as it sold fashion inspired by clothing worn by TV and film stars.
It grew to become an online fashion marketplace stocking hundreds of brands as well as its own lines and at one time was valued at more than £6bn.
Its largest shareholders include Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen – who owns Danish clothing giant Bestseller and Mike Ashley, owner of Frasers Group.
[BBC]
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Advisory for Heavy Rain issued for the Central, Uva, Sabaragamuwa, Eastern and North-central provinces and in Galle and Matara districts
Sri Lanka opt to chase against England in Pallekele
More than 1,500 Venezuelan political prisoners apply for amnesty
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