If Theresa May loses her job over this kerfuffle over Abu Qatada’s appeals deadline, would anyone in the Cabinet be safe? If you were to rank the blunders this government has made, it wouldn’t even make the top 20. The Home Office is notoriously dysfunctional, and the real surprise is that May has made it thus far with only two or three major skirmishes. It’s fun for her enemies to claim she made a basic mistake, but it’s not clear-cut. In the weird world of European law, the number of days in a three month period can vary depending on things like the estimated postal time between London and Luxembourg. Far simpler if British justice was decided in Britain – precisely what the founders of the European Convention on Human Rights envisaged.
David Cameron has been talking tough, saying he’d like to personally FedEx escort Abu Qatada back to Jordan, etc. But he can deport him tomorrow, if he so chooses. Strasbourg gives advice, but has no power to enact. Italy doesn’t think twice about returning Tunisian terror suspects to Tunisa, even if Strasbourg complains. The European Convention of Human Rights is already incorporated in to English and Scots law, and we just don’t need a second opinion from Strasbourg. There is nothing wrong with our judicial system, which is why 99 per cent of the appeals lodged against it in Strasbourg are rejected. But the appeals process is an effective and intolerable stalling device in a dysfunctional court with 150,000 cases outstanding.
The ECHR judges are almost entirely worse-qualified than those who sit on the new UK Supreme Court: you have Russian academics with no judicial experience at all, and even the British president of the court had no senior judicial experience before landing the Strasbourg job. This is not about Abu Qadata but about the basic principle: who decides the laws? Where does accountability lie? As the Metric Martyrs judgment makes clear, sovereignty in Britain lies with parliament. Cameron is not being held hostage by Strasbourg, much though it may suit him to pretend otherwise. If he wanted to bring forward a Bill of Rights and declare it senior to Strasbourg, with the final decisions made in the UK Supreme Court, he could do it instantly.
UPDATE: John Rentouls tweets that ignoring Strasbourg is impossible because the Tories have no majority. He’s right, Cameron has adopted his Scrappy Doo-style “let me at ’em” position as a political balancing act. My point is that political constraints — not legal ones – are keeping Abu Qatada in Britain.A
PPS: This needn’t split the parties. Anyone serious about the human rights agenda should be shocked at how its name has been blacked by Strasbourg, and how a majority of Brits say that human rights laws are ‘bad for British justice’. The idea of human rights as a foreign agenda, being foisted on Britain, deeply undermines support for the whole agenda — and Cameron could do human rights agenda a favour by exercising his powers of discretion. Saying ‘We’ve considered Strasbourg’s opinion, but our judges disagree.’
And who are our judges? Click here for the CVs of the Justices of the UK Supreme Court. One is Jonathan Sumption, the cleverest man in England (and occasional Spectator contributor). Then have a look at a random CV from one of their Strasbourg counterparts. A British Bill of Rights would simply say that the UK Supreme Court is the UK Supreme Court.
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