Get-out clause

In the same week that Sun journalists were subjected to dawn raids at home, the British justice system released one of the leading ideologues of al-Qa’eda to walk the streets.

The fact that Abu Qatada should never have been here in the first place, having arrived in 1993 on a forged passport, is not a minor point. He has cost this country much in expense and security. He is said to be connected to terrorist jihadist groups in the UK, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia, Iraq, Indonesia, Italy, Belgium, Morocco, Libya, France, Afghanistan and Sweden — in 2007, the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission described his influence as ‘formidable, even incalculable.’

But in the late 1990s, when Qatada was in his prime, there was little state appetite to prosecute radical Islamic clerics, whose ideology had not yet shown itself to be a grave threat at home as well as abroad. UK terrorism legislation was also, back then, incomplete and shoddy.

When the Labour government tried to remedy this they found themselves only partially able to do so. For by that point the government had incorporated into British law the European Convention on Human Rights. They swiftly discovered the Convention and its court in Strasbourg to be incapable of reaching sensible judgments in matters of national security. Time and again, the rights of foreign terrorists and criminals to, for instance, enjoy ‘a family life’, overrode the rights of British people not to have dangerous terrorists among them.

Much criticism of the Labour government’s security policy was the direct result of measures instituted as (in the words of one former Labour security minister) ‘not even our second or third best option’ but forced upon them by judgments from Strasbourg.