Submissions of the Islamic Women's Council of New Zealand (IWCNZ) to the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into the Attack on Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019Submissions of the Islamic Women's Council of New Zealand (IWCNZ) to the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into the Attack on Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019

"These submissions of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand (IWCNZ) address Term of Reference 2(c) and 2(d) of the Order of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Attack on Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019. In summary, they set out how IWCNZ made intense efforts to engage with the New Zealand government in the five years before the Christchurch mosque killings, seeking protection and support for an increasingly vulnerable and exposed Muslim community. They intensified their efforts three years before the killings, due to the intensification of Islamophobia, which particularly impacted Muslim women who were the public face of Islam due to their head scarfs. The aim of their engagement was to establish supportive across- government policies, funding and systems to enable Muslim social integration, to reduce social disadvantage and to provide protection. By 2017 IWCNZ had become gravely concerned with the level of Islamophobia and alt right activity and had a sense of urgency that action at a national level needed to be taken to protect and support the Muslim community. Through their grassroots networks they knew that the temperature was increasing amongst outliers and that New Zealand had such people within its community. There can be no question that the IWCNZ actions and advocacy was so clear, government had at least two years to ‘get it right’ and put in place concrete steps for the support and protection of the Muslim community. After all, there was an international impetus on government, from its membership of the United Nations and international community, to develop its own projects to counter violent extremism. All recommended state actions required, at their base, the taking of proactive steps to ensure social integration and social cohesion. Yet almost nothing was in place by the time of the mosque shootings. No nationwide strategy, no co-ordinated or linked up protection programmes by police or SIS, no register of hate crimes, no nationally identified funding for social integration of Muslims, (apart from female youth camps in the Waikato) and no employment initiatives (apart from Corrections). IWCNZ had to engage with a civil service containing, to a large extent, poorly trained, unprofessional and uninformed officials, and slow, unmotivated, uninterested agencies. Officials failed to prepare and failed to heed advice from the community about how serious the risks were. They ignored evidence put in front of them. If government agencies had taken effective action following their senior officials’ engagement with Muslim leaders on 23 March 2017, then a strong effective system of national supports would have been in place by 15 March 2019. Those supports, if they had existed, could have been actioned nationally when a threat was made on 20 February 2019 from Christchurch, to burn a Quran on 15 March 2019 outside the Hamilton Mosque."--Introduction.