I am sure Dan Hodges is correct: Abu Qatada is not a great poster boy for civil liberties. He is not a British citizen and seems to have abused the privileges afforded him when he was granted asylum in this country. Deporting him to Jordan, where he is wanted on terrorism charges, must be a popular move. Nevertheless, the European Court of Human Rights has a strong case: sending Qatada to a country in which the evidence against him may well depend upon torture compromises Qatada’s hopes of a fair trial.
Even if this were not the case you might think the fact he would be put on trial in Jordan is enough to compromise his prospects for a decent trial. Jordan may not be Saudi Arabia or Iran but it is not Canada or Finland either. Freedom House are quite clear on this: Jordan is in the “Not Free” camp. Is this the kind of country to which we should be deporting anyone, even those of whom we may have good reason to disapprove?
And there is this: either the UK government disapproves of torture or it is happy to disapprove of it in some countries while tolerating and perhaps even tacitly encouraging it in others. Though deporting Qatada to Jordon would dispose of the problem of what to do with him it also makes the British government an accomplice to the activities of the Jordanian security apparatus. It encourages the use of torture in other cases for the Jordanian authorities – or those in other countries where comparable cases may arise – will discover that though western governments deplore their brutality publicly they are happy to take advantage of it when it proves convenient to do so. (Of course this is also true of intelligence sharing but that’s a different matter.)
Besides, given Qatada’s record it seems remarkable that there is nothing in the great list of British criminal offences for which he can be put on trial in this country. Perhaps he really is a danger to public safety. If so then let this be tested in a British court. There appears to be a widespread assumption that he “must” be guilty of “something”. Perhaps that is a reasonable belief. Where, then, is the charge?
Fretting about these matters is not, actually, the preserve of liberals self-imprisoned in their ivory towers; it is, rather, something sometimes reckoned, at least when it proves convenient to do so, as one of the defining virtues of what used to be called the British way of life. Douglas Murray offers a muscular response to this, arguing that the court can go hang and Britain should deport Qatada anyway. It is, you see, what the French or Italians would do. Perhaps it is; it’s also the srt of thing – respect for the rule of law – that once made Britons think themselves superior to the French or Italians. Chauvinism? Certainly but a kind of chauvinism based (notionally at least) on something positive.
Peter Oborne’s Telegraph column last week made much of the European Court of Human Rights’ British origins. Rightly so, even if summoning the spirit of Winston Churchill required him to ignore Churchill’s own enthusiasm for internment, the suspension of habeas corpus and much else besides (including, incidentally, the use of chemical weapons). Nevertheless: the Second World War was a different kettle of fish entirely: a conflict that demanded the almost total mobilisation of state and society. The struggle against crackpot Islamic extremism is a different, more limited, thing and so, plainly, is the nature of the threat the country faces.
If this means we must tolerate unpleasant, even awful, people bcause we lack the laws to imprison them simply because we suspect they hold unpleasant, even awful opinions then so be it. There will always be those who argue “but if it saves just one life” and those who prefer to be “safe than sorry” but where does this end? Few people are really willing to push those arguments to their grim, illiberal end. So, as Mr Hodges says, lines must be drawn even by those with little appetite for liberalism.
On the whole, I’d think better of a country that refused to send suspects to countries with a proven fondness for torture. Doing so is another signal to those regimes that they can stamp on their own people’s rights and, when this proves useful to us, we will not make a fuss. It puts us on their side, not that of the brave liberals and dissidents who oppose regimes that, in normal circumstaces, we consider utterly deplorable. The affairs of state may be an organised hypocrisy but that does not mean we must champion that hypocrisy.
If Qatada is such a menace, put him on trial in the United Kingdom. He does not seem a pleasant man possessing pleasant opinions but the case is not, whatever Mr Hodges says, about our evaluation of Mr Qatada but is, rather, a question of how we see ourselves. That’s why it is important and why liberals from all parties have reason to despair at the decisions made by successive governments of different parties.
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