The 24 hours that plunged may's success into human rights chaos
Last-minute appeal from Qatada sabotaged the Home secretary's deportation triumph
THERESA MAY put on a pair of her famously colourful shoes and went out on the town on Tuesday night, no doubt believing she had earned the right to have a drink or two.
The Home Secretary was pictured with her husband and other guests including Lorraine Kelly, the television presenter, at the V&A museum, smiling broadly as she enjoyed the lavish birthday party of a celebrity PR agent.
It was the end of a long day in which she had appeared to seize the initiative in the battle to deport to Jordan Abu Qatada, the Islamist preacher detained without trial in Britain for almost a decade.
Her plan had been to avoid appealing against the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in January that he could not be deported, which had led to him being freed on bail. Instead, she would restart the process by a route that relied on assurances given by Jordan that evidence obtained through torture would not be used against him in any trial.
Mrs May’s people had let it be known that a decision on Qatada’s fate was approaching, and so camera crews were in place at 12.30pm when the UK Borders Agency arrived at the family home in north-west London where he has been under effective house arrest since January. Five immigration officials were filmed as they swept into the building and 15 minutes later emerged with the 51-year-old terrorist suspect, wearing a long dark tunic and white trainers.
Two hours later Mr Qatada was in the dock at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac), the tribunal off Chancery Lane in central London that deals with expulsions on national security grounds Justice had moved so swiftly that the proceedings had to be adjourned for 15 minutes as there was no interpreter in court. By 6pm the defendant, addressed by his birth name Omar Othman, had been refused bail and was on his way to high-security Belmarsh prison.
Even the judge, Mr Justice Mitting, had sounded hopeful that the drawn-out process to deport Mr Qatada could be entering the final stages, saying: “If the parties act with great rapidity it is possible that this very long-running saga can be brought to a rapid conclusion within a matter of at most a very few weeks.”
Meanwhile, at 3.30pm, the Home Secretary made her triumphant appearance in the House of Commons to announce, to cheers from the Conservative benches, that the Islamist preacher could at last be deported. Born in Bethlehem, Qatada arrived in Britain in 1993 and was granted refugee status after claiming he had been tortured in Jordan. But security services monitored his speeches encouraging young Muslims to rise up against the West and after the 9/11 attacks, he was held without trial as a suspected extremist.
Mrs May admitted he could appeal against the new deportation order, delaying it by “many months”, but insisted: “I believe the assurances and the information we have gathered will mean that we can soon put Qatada on a plane and get him out of our country for good.” Mrs May added that the Government was tak- ing steps to reform the Strasbourg court that blocked his deportation, perhaps hoping her move would put the modest proposals being discussed in Brighton in a more positive light.
Nick Boles, the Tory MP for Grantham and Stamford, had told her: “You have remained admirably calm in the face of a string of responses from former and ‘wannabe’ Home Office ministers on the other side, whose bluster has not concealed the fact they utterly failed over the course of nine years to make any progress in getting this man out of this country.”
Mrs May was also backed by a spokesman for the Prime Minister, who said the Home Secretary has “obviously been working very hard with the Jordanians” to get the reassurances needed to con- vince judges that the preacher could be safely sent to face trial abroad.
There was even rare praise from human rights campaigners, such as Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty, who welcomed the fact that the minister had resisted the temptation to win easy headlines and backbench praise by kicking out Mr Qatada before the legal process was completed.
“Credit must go where it is due and it is due to the Home Secretary today,” she said. “We don’t always agree on the application of human rights, but she seems to understand that if the Government does not respect the rule of law, why should anyone else?” But when looking at the positive coverage of her move in yesterday’s newspapers, Mrs May might have asked herself why Mr Qatada appeared to be smiling in the photographs of his arrest. It may be that he knew the carefully choreographed event would soon unravel, as his human rights solicitor, Gareth Peirce, was confident she had time to appeal against the original Strasbourg ruling and derail the deportation attempt.
At 2.15pm yesterday, just over 24 hours after the arrest, the BBC reported that the European Court had received an appeal from Mr Qatada’s legal team to the Grand Chamber late the previous night.
The Home Office was quick to declare that Mr Qatada had “no right” to make such an appeal as the deadline had passed, and Mrs May was rushed on to radio and television news channels to make the point personally. She insisted that her officials had checked when the window for an appeal would close, telling the BBC News channel: “This is a delaying tactic from Abu Qatada.”
Legal commentators and politicians scoured official documents in a vain attempt to establish if three months from the Jan 17 ruling meant an appeal would have to be filed by midnight on April 16, as Mrs May insisted, or if it was still possible for a later application to be made. It was even questioned whether the leap year might have affected calculations.
After all the lofty debates about human rights and tough talk of protecting national security, the nine-year battle to remove “Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe” had descended into a grim farce over a calendar.