Ignore the European Court and deport Abu Qatada tonight

The Al-Qaeda preacher Abu Qatada is a Jordanian national who is in the UK illegally (having come here in 1993 on a forged United Arab Emirates passport). The headache he has caused successive UK governments looks like finally reaching a peak. But there is a simple solution to the problem he poses.

Last month, not only for the first time in the decade-long Qatada process, but for the first time ever in an extradition case, the European Court of Human Rights cited Article 6 ‘rights to fair trial’ to ensure that Abu Qatada could not be returned to Jordan. The Court had previously played around in the Qatada case only with Articles 2, 3 and 5. So through citing Article 6 the ECtHR not only moved the goal-posts, it made a mockery of the extraordinary efforts made by the last government to ensure it jumped through every previous hoop the ECtHR set up (including putting together a memorandum of understanding with Jordan in 2005 to satisfy Article 3 demands, which ensured that Qatada himself would not be mistreated).

Despite the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission (SIAC) ruling in 2007 that the ‘reach and depth’ of Qatada’s influence is ‘formidable, even incalculable,’ yesterday a judge from the same body ruled, in the wake of the ECtHR decision, that Qatada must now be released on bail. Because of the ECtHR, someone who is here illegally looks set to remain here in perpetuity, posing a threat to national security and costing the British taxpayer untold millions of pounds.

Unless, that is, the government acts.

There are three ways the government can rid itself of this problem. The first, as James notes, is that the Prime Minister begins an effort to reach agreement between every member of the Council of Europe to make changes to the Convention and Court to ensure that a case like Qatada’s cannot be repeated.