The Migration 5 countries have shelved plans to share citizens’ criminal convictions with their partner nations.
Immigration New Zealand identity manager Matt Gibbs said information-sharing arrangements were one aspect of its M5 co-operation.
“Existing arrangements are focused on immigration identity management and do not involve the sharing of New Zealand Police criminal conviction information,” he said. “M5 countries also do not share their own citizens’ data through these arrangements.”
He said more recent discussions had centred on whether M5’s border agencies could use anonymised fingerprint biometrics to check for police information or criminal records.
“New Zealand agencies involved in that work concluded there is no basis under current legislation for overseas agencies to query New Zealand Police’s systems or court criminal conviction information for immigration purposes.
“No biometric or criminal conviction information was shared during this exploratory work. Migration 5 heads agreed to pause this work in April 2026 and the subgroup has not met since its last formal virtual meeting on 27 March 2025.”
Those agreements set out plans for annual reviews and detailing of any privacy or security breaches, but RNZ was previously told they were not formal processes and none had been completed.
Gibbs said a quality assurance framework had been developed to enable more comprehensive reviews, after it was agreed by M5 partners in May 2025. The first annual reviews began in early 2026.
“The quality assurance reviews conducted by New Zealand did not identify any privacy breaches, security breaches related to system access or accidental/inappropriate disclosures of information to M5 partners for the 2025 calendar year.”
Information through the Official Information Act shows Australia asked whether New Zealand had information on travellers in more than a million cases in the year to April 2026 and there were fingerprint matches in 676 cases. The numbers for Canada and the US were redacted.
New Zealand asked for information on about 4000 travellers each from Canada, Australia and the UK, with hits on 383, 340 and 283 respectively. US numbers were withheld on grounds of international relations.