The interminable Abu Qatada affair proves Britain needs to bring home the rule
of law.


Rule of law: Britain, under David Cameron, seen here with other European leaders, should be removed from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. Photo: EPA

By Charles Moore

8:25PM BST 20 Apr 2012

Yes, there is even a European Convention on the Calculation of Time Limits.
And yes, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, acting on poor advice from
government lawyers, appears to have misunderstood it.

The Convention was drawn up in 1972 by the Council of Europe “to achieve a
greater unity between its members, in particular by the adoption of common
rules”. It defines the dies a quo and dies ad quem – the start and end of
any time-limit.

Forty years on, it would seem that the desired unity has still not been
achieved, so instead we got the dies irae. Mrs May and her team believed
they had pulled off a parliamentary coup on Tuesday – when, she thought, the
dies ad quem had passed – by saying she was going to deport Abu Qatada
without any more appeals to Strasbourg. Piqued, Strasbourg seems to have
hurried to tell Abu Qatada’s lawyers that they did, in fact, have time. His
appeal was duly lodged on Wednesday night.

As Mrs May implicitly admitted, the whole thing was a piece of nonsense
anyway, since the end of the time-limit would not have meant that all
appeals to Strasbourg were automatically ruled out. She was really only
looking for good political theatre, and she got it. But on Thursday, it was
replayed as farce.

All of which makes Westminster-watchers gleeful. What does this say, they ask,
about her judgment, about Home Office official competence, dingy legal
advisers and an accident-prone Coalition? All such questions are reasonable
or, at least, inevitable

Yes, there is even a European Convention on the Calculation of Time Limits.
And yes, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, acting on poor advice from
government lawyers, appears to have misunderstood it.

The Convention was drawn up in 1972 by the Council of Europe “to achieve a
greater unity between its members, in particular by the adoption of common
rules”. It defines the dies a quo and dies ad quem – the start and end of
any time-limit.

Forty years on, it would seem that the desired unity has still not been
achieved, so instead we got the dies irae. Mrs May and her team believed
they had pulled off a parliamentary coup on Tuesday – when, she thought, the
dies ad quem had passed – by saying she was going to deport Abu Qatada
without any more appeals to Strasbourg. Piqued, Strasbourg seems to have
hurried to tell Abu Qatada’s lawyers that they did, in fact, have time. His
appeal was duly lodged on Wednesday night.

As Mrs May implicitly admitted, the whole thing was a piece of nonsense
anyway, since the end of the time-limit would not have meant that all
appeals to Strasbourg were automatically ruled out. She was really only
looking for good political theatre, and she got it. But on Thursday, it was
replayed as farce.

All of which makes Westminster-watchers gleeful. What does this say, they ask,
about her judgment, about Home Office official competence, dingy legal
advisers and an accident-prone Coalition? All such questions are reasonable
or, at least, inevitable
But what about the case itself? What about human rights and Abu Qatada? There
may be a European Convention on the Calculation of Time Limits, but there
seems to be no European Convention against the Waste of Time.

Like Jesus, Abu Qatada was born in Bethlehem, but there the resemblance ends.
Accompanied by Mrs Qatada and five little Qatadas, he first came to Britain
in 1993. He arrived on a forged passport. We gave him political asylum in
1994. Since he got here, he has been what Islamists call a “scholar”, a
theorist of extremist violence, much consulted by those whose interest in
the subject is not solely theoretical. In 1999, he was convicted of
terrorist offences in Jordan, in his absence.

Since 2002, we have, off and on, detained him, and we have been trying to
deport him. Recently, Mrs May flew to Jordan and won assurances that, if he
were extradited there, he would not be tried with evidence extracted under
torture. The way would appear to be open for his return to Jordan.

I have only limited space, so I shall not list the number of court appearances
all this has involved, or the number of lawyers’ bills borne at the public
expense, or the hours of official and ministerial time exhausted on this
man. It is necessary only to say that, residing here for a generation, Abu
Qatada has brought us nothing but sorrow and expense


“So what?”, human rights purists object. Rights are not lessened because the
person claiming them is objectionable. Actually, this is not completely
true. The civil law is familiar with the phenomenon of the “vexatious
litigant”, the person so crazy or bitter that he sues and sues and sues
again just for the fun of arguing. Might there not be a human rights
equivalent – a person who never accepts the jurisdiction under which he
finds himself living yet goes on exploiting its rules to his advantage (and
at its expense) until the crack of doom? There is no dies ad quem for him.

Abu Qatada is not even a British citizen. Most people would agree, however
unenthusiastically, that our fellow citizens should be protected by whatever
rights our laws provide, even when they are persistently criminal. They must
have fair trials, legal representation, sentences that do not exceed the
stated dose, and so on. But, outside those London postal codes where human
rights lawyers cluster more thickly than pigeons in Trafalgar Square, I have
scarcely met anyone who thinks we owe comparable legal duties to every
foreigner who washes up on these shores. Hosts have duties of hospitality,
for sure, but guests have duties, too. When they do not observe them, the
host’s duties are suspended. Abu Qatada has never observed those duties from
the day he arrived. There are a few others like him.

If we had the normal rule of law in a democratic society, Abu Qatada would
have been removed before the end of the 20th century. But we don’t. We have
human rights. The effect of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)
has been to create the rights equivalents of tax havens. As Monaco shelters
the rich, so Britain harbours the extremists. Unlike Monaco, we get no
reward for our policy. The people we harbour threaten the “liberty and
security of person”, which Article 5 of the European Convention purports to
uphold. We are a less free society because we keep them here than we would
be if we could throw them out.

We made ourselves less free by signing up to the jurisdiction of the European
Court of Human Rights and by bringing – under the Blair government – the
ECHR into British law. The Convention, signed in 1950, speaks of the
signatories having “a common heritage of political traditions… and the rule
of law”. It is not so. Our tradition does not believe in universal law, but
in developing our own law through our own institutions. The continental
tradition is quite different.

This week, the Council of Europe, which is responsible for the ECHR, met in
Brighton to deliberate these matters. There, the Justice Secretary, Kenneth
Clarke, bathetically announced exciting new measures to cut the backlog of
cases from 150,000 to 90,000, the latter still an almost unbelievably large
figure. The backlog is undoubtedly preposterous, but it is also Mr Clarke’s
red herring. Earlier Government claims about returning powers to the courts
of member states slid away. Nothing had really changed.


It was left to Sir Nicolas Bratza, the President of the Court, to explain why.
He rejected any attempt to enshrine in law the “margin of appreciation” by
which nations regain some power from his Court. In his view, the Court
should be “independent”. Of course, he is right, in the sense that, in a
civilised country, the courts are never under political control. But Sir
Nicolas means something else by independence. He means absolute
unanswerability to any authority whatever. In Britain, our courts are
independent (or were, before the ECHR and the European Union came along),
but they exist under the rule of national law that guarantees them.
Parliament can reform them. No Parliament can reform the European Court of
Human Rights.

Which should, surely, clarify matters. There is not the faintest chance that
the Court will stand aside for the national courts. Its mission is to grow
in power. Its latest project, which Sir Nicolas also (unreported)
emphasised, is to take the EU within its ambit. When this happens, Britain
will find herself doubly bound. An axis of Brussels and Strasbourg will make
the law of England no more independent than is the Bank of Greece in its
handling of the euro.

We are under an exterior authority, which is something which we strove
successfully, for hundreds of years, to avoid. This is not what the British
have meant by “the rule of law”. So the answer is to remove ourselves from
the jurisdiction of the Court and bring our rights home.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9216724/We-cant-reform-the-European-Court-of-Human-Rights-so-lets-end-this-nonsense.html