Qatada champions al-Qaida and delights in terrorist outrages. But Britain is robust enough to tolerate madcap clerics
There is no argument. The Muslim cleric Abu Qatada is as unpleasant a character as ever graced Britain's shores. Wanted on terrorism charges in eight countries, including his own of Jordan, his championing of al-Qaida and his delight in terrorist outrages puts him beyond any reasonable pale. He propounds violence and seeks to corrupt the young. There is no obligation on any country to tolerate such a guest. He is a citizen of Jordan and has forfeited any serious claim on the hospitality of the British judicial system.
As for the European court of human rights, its role in helping him avoid deportation is otiose. The convention it claims ponderously to enforce prohibits anyone's removal to places where there is "a real risk" of torture. No one says Abu Qatada risks torture, so the court, frantic to administer Eurosceptic Britain a bloody nose, conflates opposition to torture with article six on getting "a fair trial", where a plaintiff might be vulnerable to evidence derived from torturing someone else. The fair trial article is so vague it could plausibly be invoked against any justice system. The ECHR is bogged down in empire-building and is a mess.
That the risk of Qatada not getting a fair trial back home in Jordan should override the risk of his continued pro-terrorist activities in Britain is inherently absurd. Meanwhile, the government's failure to win deportation – permitted by British judges up to the supreme court – is justifying Britain's increasingly odious methods of holding Qatada and others like him in various forms of detention, without the necessity of bringing them to trial.
The antics of Whitehall lawyers in Belmarsh jail are like those of President Obama in Guantánamo Bay. This week they found themselves in the bizarre position of being ordered by a judge to release Qatada on "control order" bail, with total release in three months if there was no progress in the negotiations to have him face trial in Jordan. This is under rules that the Home Office itself drew up. The result has been a real crisis of confidence between judges and public opinion. Ministers might reflect that it is easy to stray from the rule of law, but hard to retrace one's steps.
I can't see why the government does not dump Qatada on the next plane to Amman and have done with him. He has been declared a public menace, and charged with a serious offence back home. Britain is entitled to treat the ECHR finding as advisory and put its security first. Qatada broke his last bail condition and is as cast-iron a candidate for expulsion as can be imagined. The ECHR can go eat muesli.
So far so simple. But there are deeper implications to this affair. While I would happily deport Qatada, as long as he is in this country he is entitled to the full protection of the law. Lord Hoffmann in the 2004 law lords' "Belmarsh judgment" warned parliament that the steady erosion of habeas corpus and extension of detention without trial threatened "the very existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention". That liberty also extends to free speech, however odious.
The judgment was opposed by the then home secretary, Charles Clarke – one of a succession of ministers who have struggled and failed to marry Westminster's weak commitment to civil liberty with the howling of the securocrats and media for extrajudicial action. Clarke sought refuge behind parliamentary sovereignty, code for securocrat capture. The illiberal Home Office misses no chance to extend executive discretion.
Britain's post-9/11 edifice of detention without trial is the judicial detritus of George Bush and Tony Blair's war on terror, a specious conflation of two quite different concepts: a random terrorist act, and a realistic threat to state security. A smokescreen of paranoid spin-smothered civil liberties with headline-grabbing authoritarian initiatives. It created a new category of political criminals who could be locked up peremptorily as enemies of the state. Like the red menace during the cold war, the war on terror was a naked exploitation of the politics of fear.
Since the outrages in New York and London in the last decade, successful bomb attacks on western cities have been remarkably few. They have been prevented not by aggression against distant regimes but by intelligence and sound policing. Even if some bombers were to "get through", it abuses common sense to portray them as threats to the security or stability of the nation, let alone to what Blair called "western civilisation as we know it". When ministers waffle about criminals in such grandiose terms, we should worry not about the criminals but about the sanity of ministers and the company they keep.
Qatada clearly incited others to criminal acts, which merits his arrest and trial or, on a lower threshold of evidence, his deportation. What he and his activities surely do not merit is the continued suspension of the rule of law, or of freedom of speech under the shrill catch-all of "hate crime".
Some preachers peddle messages so crazed as to merit surveillance. But Britain is robust enough to survive the occasional outrage and not cede freedom to the grim citadels of a police state. Its conduits of argument, education and information are robust enough to tolerate a few madcap clerics. I cannot believe Qatada is worth the fuss. If we cannot expel him, leave his ranting to the wayward disciplines of democracy and watchful eye of Scotland Yard.
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