April 11, 2008
The human rights jihad
Daily Mail, 11 April 2008
How al Qaeda must be gloating. What would any sane country do if it discovered that living among it was Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man, who was wanted by his own country on terrorism charges? It’s a fair bet that it would deport him to that country as fast as it could.
What does Britain do in those circumstances? Declare that extradition would be a breach of his human rights and prepare to release him from jail under indefinite house arrest, courtesy of the British taxpayer, to the tune of some £1,000 per month in welfare benefits.
This is the surreal situation following the Appeal Court judgment this week on Abu Qatada, who is currently in jail fighting deportation to his native Jordan where he was convicted in his absence on terrorist charges in both 1999 and 2000.
The judgment, which overturned a ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that Abu Qatada should be deported, ruled instead that he could stay because, if Jordan prosecuted him, the evidence against him might have been obtained through torture and thus be in breach of human rights law.
In a separate but simultaneous judgment, the court cleared two Libyan terrorist suspects to remain in Britain for the rest of their lives because it did not believe assurances by Libya that it would not torture them if they returned.
One of these men had been found with a map marked with the flightpath to Birmingham Airport. The other was said to be involved with an Italian terror cell which was poised to launch a terrorist attack in Europe.
As a result of this second ruling, the Home Office has been forced to abandon deportation cases against a further ten Libyan suspects.
Between them, these judgments have left the Government’s anti-terrorism strategy in ruins. Despite Tony Blair’s declaration after the 2005 London bombings that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ and that terrorist suspects would henceforth be thrown out of the country, not one such suspect has been deported.
In the case of Abu Qatada, this notorious godfather of terrorism who turned Britain into the European hub of al Qaeda — causing foreign security services to dub it ‘Londonistan’ — has now made a monkey of us yet again.
How on earth have we got ourselves into such an insane position?
The reason is the way the judges have interpreted the European Convention on Human Rights. In cases in 1989 and 1996, the European Court of Human Rights extended the scope of the Convention’s prohibition against torture, making it impossible to deport suspected terrorists to any country thought to be abusing human rights.
And the English courts applied this ruling far more zealously than those in any other country.
This meant that, even if people turning up at immigration control presented a clear danger to this country, Britain let them all in if they claimed they would be ill-treated if they were sent back home. And by the same absurd reasoning, once they were in the courts wouldn’t allow them to be sent back.
This is precisely what happened with Abu Qatada. He turned up in 1993 and successfully claimed leave to remain on the basis he had been tortured by the Jordanians.
Maybe this was true. But Britain accordingly decided he should be allowed to live here even though — as it was repeatedly warned — he was a threat to the entire Western world.
Of course torture is a terrible thing, and it is right that Britain should not be involved in its practice. But this fine principle has been progressively stretched to ever more ludicrous lengths.
It is simply perverse in the extreme to require a country ever to put its own security at risk. Indeed, the Geneva Convention gives countries an explicit right to return any refugee who can reasonably be regarded as a danger to society.
Yet the English courts have laid down that Britain must accommodate people posing just such a risk — if there is a possibility that torture might be employed not in Britain but in another country altogether.
On that basis, this country must welcome its enemies with open arms. Indeed, the more dangerous they are, the more likely it is that the courts will insist they must remain here, since such people will be expected to argue that they will be ill-treated in their country of origin.
Bad as that is, this week’s judgment takes us even further down this lunatic road. For the court ruled that Abu Qatada should not be returned to Jordan — not because he might be tortured, but because any evidence used against him might have been obtained by torturing his co-defendants or witnesses in the trials in which he was convicted.
So, bizarrely, our judges are preventing us from deporting a man who is a risk to our security, not even because of fears about his own welfare but about the welfare of others — who have nothing to do with Britain.
What bewigged bone-headedness is this?
And just look at the threat this man poses. For Abu Qatada is said to be the spiritual head of al Qaeda in Europe.
The Special Immigration Appeals Commission said he was a grave threat to national security with a ‘formidable, even incalculable’ reach and influence. He led Spanish, German and Italian al Qaeda cells from his base in London. And for nine years, until the British police finally arrested him, he radicalised countless thousands of impressionable young British Muslims.
Yet now he is to be released under a control order — under which a number of terrorist suspects have managed to abscond — at enormous and unlimited cost to the public purse.
This is but the latest security debacle caused by a judiciary which has allowed its collective obsession with human rights law to destroy common sense.
Having made a bonfire of this country’s border controls, the courts have frustrated every attempt by the Government to exclude foreign undesirables from the country or lock them up.
The real problem, however, is the human rights law which has given the judges the power to cause this chaos.
Refusing to face the fact that we either have to change this law or get rid of it altogether, the Government has twisted and turned to get round it.
So it painfully extracted undertakings from countries such as Jordan and Libya that they would not ill-treat any terrorist suspects who were returned to them. And it pinned its hopes on the European Court of Human Rights overturning its own ban on sending people to countries where ill-treatment was practised.
But the Appeal Court has now said such agreements are unreliable, and the European Court has adhered to its ban. So the Government is well and truly stuck.
The implications of this shambles are truly alarming. It’s not just that Abu Qatada and others must remain in Britain at taxpayers’ expense.
These rulings are a positive invitation and incentive to foreign terrorists to flock to Britain — the one country in the world from where they know they won’t be sent back.
This is exactly why Britain became the European centre of al Qaeda in the first place, putting both Britain and the whole world at risk from Abu Qatada and his ilk.
In the years that have followed 9/11 and 7/7, what therefore do the Government and the judiciary appear to have learned? Precisely nothing.
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The human rights jihad
