Green MP Golriz Ghahraman pictured with Rwandan singer-songwriter Simon Bikindi, who was convicted of inciting genocide in his country.

OPINION: Let me start by acknowledging that Phil Quin has spent substantial time in Rwanda engaging with its people and trying to help that country heal. I do not question his commitment to the country or his understanding of the genocide or its effects.

Nevertheless, the charges he lays against Golriz Ghahraman regarding her time in that country don't stack up.

Basically, they boil down to two things.

TWITTER/GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN Golriz Ghahraman at the defence table (left).

First, he says she unnecessarily "chose" to go to Rwanda to volunteer on the defence side of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

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Second, she co-authored an article with a more senior lawyer that, according to Quin, knowingly repeats genocide-denying canards.

I think both these alleged misdeeds are mistaken.

Quin's first charge rests on a claimed distinction between paid legal representatives, which Quin accepts are a necessary and legitimate component of the ICTR process, and interns.

Quin then glosses over the fact that Ghahraman's internship only lasted 3 months, after which she became a paid member of a legal team. So, what Quin really is left complaining about is those three months during which Ghahraman was "volunteering".

How, then, did such internships come about? They weren't candy that the ICTR defence teams could hand out to whomever comes begging.

They were official positions that the UN established, which individuals had to apply for and be accepted into, before being assigned to whatever tasks the UN had to hand.

So, any idea that Ghahraman looked over a list of accused war criminals and thought "I'd like to work for that one" is simply false.

Indeed, Quin's beef with allowing people to volunteer as an unpaid part of the ITR defence process would appear better aimed at the UN rather than someone wanting to get a first step on the ladder towards a career in international human rights law.

Nevertheless, it is still true that Ghahraman volunteered to work in Rwanda. However, how exactly did the defence lawyers,which Quin accepts had a valid role, get there?

Well, they either agreed to work directly for one of the accused, or else agreed to be a part of a pool of lawyers from which lawyers were assigned to defendants who couldn't afford to pay for one. In other words, they volunteered for the work.

What, then, is the difference between a paid UN defence representative who has volunteered to be a part of the ICTR process and someone who gets assigned to a defence team after winning an official slot on the UN internship programme? And why exactly does Quin have a problem with the latter, but not the former?

Quin's second claim then relates to an article that Ghahraman authored with a more senior lawyer in 2008, which he says repeats certain claims that support genocide denial. Without going into detail on this, he simply misrepresents the paper's argument.

The article in question simply does not deny genocide. It is a completely standard academic investigation of the legal consequences of a hypothetical situation, published in the well-regardedJournal of International Criminal Justice.

Aside from misrepresenting what the article is about, there's then another problem with Quin's attack on it.

He says it revisits a "dark, debunked conspiracy theory" that the Rwandan Patriotic Army shot down a plane containing former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, an act which triggered the genocide.

It is true that this conspiracy theory has been conclusively debunked. But the report that did so was issued in 2012, some four years after the paper's publication.

To then thoroughly damn a 25-year-old Ghahraman for helping to write a speculative academic paper, largely on the basis of the findings of a report that came out four years later, seems remarkably churlish. And to label it as some sort of apology for genocide or giver of comfort to those who committed genocide is simply preposterous.

With all due respect to Quin's experience in Rwanda and knowledge of the ground there, he has not accurately represented what Ghahraman's place at the ICTR involved, nor is his criticism of a paper she helped co-write really fair.

- Andrew Geddis is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Otago