Law's the Law
I agree wholeheartedly with this article by Daniel Finkelstein writing in The Times - people like Abu Qatada care nothing about other people's human rights and believe that their own actions - up to an including murder and terrorism - are justified because they are following the will of their God.
So while I wouldn't support just bundling this man on the first plane to Jordan - it does seem to me crazy that the human rights of one individual can be elevated above the human rights of many more UK citizens - to whom Abu Qatada presents a real and present danger, according to our own domestic courts.
And if our laws are offending good reason and common sense - if the legal system is not working in the way that is intended, that's what MPs are for - to find a solution and make new laws if necessary.
I hate Abu Qatada too – but the law’s the law
By Daniel Finkelstein
Do we seriously want the Home Secretary to ignore the pesky courts and just shove this man on a plane?
Omar Othman is a dangerous man who thinks it is a good idea to kill Jews. Taking one thing with another, on balance I am against such people. So, since he likes to knock around in Wembley, and Wembley is almost the only place in London that can truthfully describe itself as near Pinner, I’ve been keeping a careful eye on him these past months.
Towards the end of the 1990s, a number of Mr Othman’s friends ended up in court on a series of terrorist charges — unauthorised possession of explosives, planning to sell automatic weapons, that sort of thing. One of the main ideas was to kill Jewish tourists.
And Mr Othman was wrapped up in the plotting. Or at least so the others said. He’d handed over money to buy a computer, messages had been found between him and the gang, and he had, the evidence suggests, proposed targets and congratulated the bombers when the explosives went off.
Right from the beginning, however, there were questions about how the prosecution case had been put together. The whole thing relied heavily on confessions that the witnesses claim were the result of torture and beatings. And although this has always been denied, the denials have never been wholly convincing.
You may think this is the first time you have heard of this case. But in fact you know it quite well. Because Omar Othman is the real name of someone called Abu Qatada.
You will, I hope, excuse me for this little device. But there was a point to the sleight of hand. Everyone has formed a view about Abu Qatada; decided exactly the right thing to happen. Back he should go to where he did or didn’t come from, wherever on Earth that was. I just wanted to point out that it is not a very good idea for all of us to start passing judgment on legal cases of people when we don’t even know their name.
That’s why we have courts. And evidence. And lawyers. And judges. It’s why we have hearings. And appeals. And more appeals. To nail down the guy’s name, and, you know, perhaps some other stuff, before deporting him.
A funny thing has happened to be me during the trials of Omar Othman. I genuinely fear him, not just people like him, but him. I don’t want that he should live in Wembley. And I am irritated that his case has relied partially on judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, which is a deeply flawed arrangement.
But I have started to fear those who want to deport Abu Qatada at any price almost as much as I fear him.
The most recent judgment on his case — in which Theresa May lost — produced two extraordinary reactions. The first was that the Home Secretary should stop faffing around and put Mr Othman on a plane back to Jordan, where he has been convicted of terrorist offences. Never mind the courts and their pettifogging interventions.
In other words, the Home Secretary should call up some friendly policemen, tell them just to do what they are told and stop going on about the law, give them an address and get them to pop over to Wembley with some handcuffs.
Do we really, seriously, want a Home Secretary to be able do this? Pick people out of the newspaper and have them flown out of the country, whatever the pesky courts say? I think I would rather live in a country where we put a politician who did that in jail, having charged them with kidnap.
And if we are going to encourage Theresa May to do some light kidnapping, why stop at Abu Qatada just because he got himself in the newspapers? How about she picks on Abu Qatada’s brother Liam Qatada, whose crimes were only mentioned in The Independent so no one read about them? (Don’t write to me. This was a joke. I know there isn’t anyone called Liam Qatada.) The other extraordinary proposal is that we might suspend the European Convention of Human Rights long enough to deport Mr Othman. Now, quite aside from the fact that this is ludicrously impractical, and would spark years of legal action all of its own, the idea of suspending a law to deal with a single case is so wrong it is hard to know where to start.
Perhaps we could suspend the law on, I don’t know, murder say, long enough for me to get rid of a few people who have been annoying me on Twitter. You get the gun, I will draw up the list, we will get David Cameron to keep the lawyers off our back. And then we will have the law restored. So if there’s anyone you want to kill you will have to do it between lunch and going home time on Thursday.
Britain is a liberal democracy built on law. When we forget that, we are not much better than Abu Qatada. We try legal cases in court and they decide upon the evidence. To do that they use case law as well as statute and they build procedures based on precedent.
I do not think it has been a good idea to allow individual right of appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. I think it is better, and hope it might be possible, that we have a British Bill of Rights. But I am astonished at how many people, particularly on the right, cannot see the value in having basic rights enshrined in law and protected by the courts.
Nobody in the press should need reminding at the moment how easy it is for basic liberties — freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest — to be endangered by a swirling mob lathering itself to a peak of self-righteousness. It’s happening right now, to us, in front of our eyes. Yet the obvious parallel with the Abu Qatada case seems nowhere to be drawn.
Deporting Abu Qatada because we dislike him so much that we don’t much care what happens to him is precisely what human rights law is designed to prevent. It is Abu Qatada who thinks that it doesn’t much matter if someone is tortured or wrongly convicted, because Allah sits in judgment anyway. We — just to remind everyone — are the people who don’t think that.
I agree that it is frustrating that a man can come here and claim asylum when he hates everything about us and would gladly kill us if he could. I agree that it is nauseating to be spending money protecting ourselves from him and financing his legal case. But law exists partly to ensure that evidence and judgment are preferred to nausea as a way of making decision over people’s rights.
If being on the right means believing in limited government, then that can’t just mean wanting lower corporation tax and an internal market in the NHS. If it means anything, it means that politics and politicians are constrained by law. And that everyone has human rights. Even people like Omar Othman, who don’t believe in them.
