As Dan Hodges tweeted earlier: “So we’re arresting Sun hacks but releasing Abu Qatada.”
Indeed. An extremist preacher who wishes death and destruction on the people of this country, and who is wanted abroad to face trial on terrorist charges, is being released, when only a few days ago police swooped in dawn raids on the homes of journalists.
I am not suggesting that the goings-on at The Sun require no investigation. Of course not. I merely observe that the police approach is heavy-handed.
The contrast will, I suspect, also strike many Britons as odd. For years now it has seemed that there is something increasingly screwy about the British set-up. The machinery of the justice system seems frequently misdirected. Our courts can so easily be over-ruled by foreign courts and there seems to be nothing that the people we send to Westminster can do about it.
This has crept up on us British gradually, but on a day like today it looks completely, starkly, dotty. Would Americans, on either the left or right, stand for it? Not for five minutes. The US is a sovereign country, and it takes press freedom seriously.
Is sovereign another word for authoritarian? Why is Abu Qatada not on trial here? Do we have evidence against him? If so, lock him up. If not, then let him go.
The idea of sending him to a country so he can conveniently disappear is certainly the ilk of fascists.
It would seem that these foreign courts are the only people left who understand the true nature of British Justice. Abu Qatada has committed no crime in the UK other than having deplorable views, which last time I checked was not a criminal offence. If there is evidence against him then send him to trial, if there is isn’t then he should be freed and left be from the harassment of the state.
Comparing his case to journalists is disingenuous, being arrested earlier in the morning is hardly comparable to the heavy handedness of locking a man up without charge or the right to a defend himself.
“Americans wouldn’t stand for it”? Americans locking up journalists: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/madison/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Jailed-subpoenaed-timeline1.pdf
And Americans allowing a supreme constitutional court (which, unlike the ECHR to which the UK freely signed up when it joined the Council of Europe, had to establish its own right of judicial review through case law i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison) overruling the government on judicial treatment and release of suspected terrorists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_Six#Release, & see the Guantanamo Uighur case.
I agree that Qatada should be expelled “bag and baggage” from Britain. The man is both a self-indulgent ninny and a dangerous islamist mountebank. HM Immigration Service should hire a JCB, scoop him up and dump him, tied up with string, on the next Fedex flight to Jordan.
But, lest your readers should, like many in the popular press, confuse the recent Strasbourg decision with a “diktat” from Brussels, it should be stressed that the European Court of Human Rights has nothing to do with EU. The court was set up, at the behest of the British – who largely wrote the rules – after World War II. It is the sharp, though frequently pointless, end of the otherwise vestigial and moribund Council of Europe.
Back in the 1970s, as a journalist, I attended several plenary sessions of the Council of Europe, and it would be hard to imagine a duller or more vacuous institution. So far as I could tell, its only purpose was the distribution of expenses to its members, most of whom were failed politicians who could barely remember their own names. It made the European Parliament on a quiet Tuesday morning appear like the Commons during PMQs.
All those scribes arrested can appeal to the European court and be released.
The release of Abu Qatada comes from the British courts. The extent of European involvement was that we couldn’t deport him to Jordan because it wasn’t possible to guarantee that his trial wouldn’t rely on evidence gained through torture.
There’s possibly a problem with European human rights law in the UK which is more to do with our system than anything. I think our courts are over-deferential towards it. They treat its rulings as if it were a common law court establishing precedent and authority, rather than a civil law one. The problem isn’t that our courts are easily overruled – which is relatively rare – but the way those cases are then interpreted within the English system. Though I think that’s changing:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/nov/15/uk-courts-european-human-rights-rulings
But all that has to happen for this not to be an issue is for Parliament to act. They could pass a law that made it okay for extradition to countries like Jordan if it’s not possible to guarantee that the evidence didn’t derive from torture. If the government chose to do that, there’s nothing the courts, European or British, could do about it. Unlike in the USA the courts can’t overrule Parliament. That’s the case even on human rights issues.
I always think it’s the odd thing about talk of a British Bill of Rights. The European Convention and the Human Rights Act don’t allow the courts to overrule Parliament. But what would apparently replace them refers explicitly to judicially protected rights and a system where the courts have far more power. A Bill of Rights would move far closer to judicial over-reach.