There is a danger in this week’s ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that Abu Hamza and four other Islamic extremists can be extradited to face terror charges in America. The danger is that it makes the court look reasonable and in doing so weakens the case for removing Britain from its jurisdiction. The Prime Minister did nothing to allay this fear when he appeared flattered by the court’s ruling, admitting only to a little frustration at the speed of its decisions.
But one apparently reasonable decision does not eliminate the court’s inadequacies, or the indefensible fact that Britain has to wait to hear from Strasbourg over matters of national security and sovereignty. Nor is this week’s decision final — Hamza and the others can appeal. The five men cannot be deported for at least three months, and even if they are finally sent to America, it will still leave Abu Qatada, who continues to live at UK taxpayers’ expense, in London. His extradition to Jordan, where he is wanted in connection with a bombing campaign, has been blocked.
The court is itself guilty of a form of fundamentalism. It reaches its decisions according to a series of absolutist principles, disregarding considerations of time, cost and the grubby realities of ensuring national security. A delay is inherently intolerable — justice delayed is justice denied. In the Abu Qatada case the court ruled that Jordan could not be trusted not to use in his trial evidence obtained by torture; yet the British government has worked extremely hard to win assurances from the Jordanians that a trial will be fair. If we are forbidden by the ECHR from co-operating with the legal system in one of the more benign countries in the Arab world, we are not going to be able to secure vital co-operation when we need it.
Had this week’s decision gone the other way, the consequences would have been grave. The five men — judgment on a sixth was deferred — were asking the court to rule out their extradition, not on the grounds of insufficient evidence but on the basis that US prison authorities could not be trusted to respect their human rights in the event of their being found guilty. It would have brought a virtual end to the exchange of wanted criminals across the Atlantic.
Built into the Strasbourg system is the presumption that the legal systems of the countries which are its signatories are morally superior to those of others: a conceit which does not stand up to examination. This week’s decision, for example, rested on the opinions of seven judges, three of whom were drawn from countries — Poland, Albania and Montenegro — which have only themselves recently emerged from dictatorship. Yet they were deemed fit to sit in judgment in cases of extradition between two of the oldest and most established democracies on Earth.
The result of protracted battles over extradition is no triumph for human rights. Quite the reverse: it has created a human rights breach of its own. One of the subjects of this week’s ruling, Barbar Ahmad, has already been held, without trial, for eight years. Other countries have shown contempt towards the ECHR’s rulings on the extradition of terror suspects. Italy recently sent a suspect to Tunisia in open defiance of its rulings, correctly reasoning that the court had no powers to enforce its decision.
That is not a route which the British government should take. We should have a Bill of Rights, passed by parliament and declared senior to Strasbourg. This is what David Cameron was contemplating before he took office. We have a newly refurbished building sitting in Parliament Square called the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. It should be allowed to live up to its name.
Power games
If the government needed further justification for its policy of breaking up the monolith of state education, it was provided this week by the teachers’ unions. Delegates at their annual conferences voted in favour of strike action in protest against the growth in academies, which are free from local government control, and over the end of national pay bargaining.
For years teaching unions have moaned — often with good reason — about excessive interference by civil servants in the running of schools. But when schools are offered more freedom it seems that they do not like that, either. The NUT’s conflicting stance only begins to make sense when viewed as a game of union power. Granting semi-independence to schools will inevitably weaken the position of the unions. It is much harder to bring a national strike when negotiations over pay and conditions become a local matter.
Individually, teachers might reach a different conclusion over the end of national pay bargaining. It is bizarre that a teacher in Surrey should be paid the same as one in Lancashire, where the cost of housing and living are so much cheaper. But the more competent economics teachers among this week’s delegates cannot seriously think they will lose out when their schools are given the freedom to pay what they like to attract the best talent.
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