{"id":630771,"date":"2026-10-14T22:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T22:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/630771\/"},"modified":"2026-10-14T22:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T22:08:11","slug":"brian-tamaki-summonsed-to-court-for-allegedly-inciting-racial-disharmony-says-he-hasnt-violated-human-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/630771\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian Tamaki summonsed to court for allegedly \u2018inciting racial disharmony\u2019, says he hasn\u2019t violated human rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI have not at all violated or crossed the line of that side of racial disharmony; that\u2019s absolutely stupid and really rubbish, it\u2019s just rubbish.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of my statements have been religious … and I\u2019ve been very consistent about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He believed the prosecution was \u201cpolitically motivated\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cI intend to challenge these charges and defend my right to speak freely, preach my faith and hold foreign political leaders accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tamaki said that while police haven\u2019t confirmed to him what event the charges are in relation to, he believed it was over comments made about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.<\/p>\n

Tamaki alleged police came to his door this morning without any warning.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an interesting charge. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ve seen any racial charge.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the charges \u201cwon\u2019t stick\u201d and that he planned to fight the allegations in court on Monday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was about that statement basically there. So you\u2019re talking about something that was already clear that I made statements from somebody that was a human rights abuser. I exposed that big time what he was doing in India with the persecution of Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier, Detective Senior Sergeant Natalie Nelson said because the charges were laid under the Human Rights Act, consent was required from the Attorney-General for police to prosecute. <\/p>\n

However, Attorney-General Chris Bishop told the Herald he was not involved in the decision-making, and that consent to prosecute an offence under the Act was delegated to the Solicitor-General.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis reflects the fact that it is not appropriate for the Attorney-General to be involved in individual prosecutions, which must be carried out without any appearance of political interference,\u201d Bishop said.<\/p>\n

Police amended their statement a couple of hours later to confirm it was the Solicitor-General who has the authority to provide consent to prosecute, not the Attorney-General.<\/p>\n

In June this year, Tamaki made remarks on his podcast accusing Modi of persecuting Christians in India and said if churches were being burned down in India, \u201cwhy don\u2019t we burn mosques and their temples down? Tit for tat\u201d.<\/p>\n

He later told Ryan Bridge TODAY he didn\u2019t mean what he said<\/a> when he called for mosques and temples to be burned down.<\/p>\n

Tamaki acknowledged he had not been threatened by any Hindu people and no churches had been burned down in New Zealand.<\/p>\n

An anti-immigration protest has been planned by Destiny Church for later this month in downtown Auckland. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI have not at all violated or crossed the line of that side of racial disharmony; that\u2019s absolutely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3050,4619,7818,12642,1558,6120,5159,12897,1349,12896,242539,2082,25901,692,42,16420,309249,13489,43,49614,5970,12718,38019,312,11669,151772,163957,31421,61,40,38,41,39,30697,5977],"class_list":["post-630771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-absolutely","tag-act","tag-allegedly","tag-appear","tag-been","tag-breaching","tag-brian","tag-church","tag-court","tag-destiny","tag-disharmony","tag-for","tag-hasnt","tag-he","tag-headlines","tag-human","tag-inciting","tag-leader","tag-news","tag-racial","tag-really","tag-rights","tag-rubbish","tag-says","tag-stupid","tag-summoned","tag-summonsed","tag-tamaki","tag-to","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-violated","tag-which"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}