Abu Qatada could be free within weeks, warns judge

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Parent Category: Africa and The World

Category: Law & Justice

Created on Thursday, 19 April 2012 00:00

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Abu Qatada could be free within weeks, warns judge

Theresa May says she will resist an application to release al-Qaida-linked Islamist cleric on bail.

Alan Travis and Owen Bowcott

The British judge at the centre of the Abu Qatada case has warned that the al-Qaida-linked Islamist cleric could be free and on the streets of London again within a fortnight.

The home secretary, Theresa May, has vowed to "resist vigorously" an application for Qatada to be released on bail, a move widely expected after the collapse of her latest attempt to deport him.

But the damaging prospect that Qatada will again be free in Britain – albeit under highly restrictive conditions – came as the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, said the outcome of a Council of Europe summit being held in Brighton would result in fewer cases being sent to the Strasbourg human rights court.

Mr Justice Mitting, the British special immigration appeals commission judge who revoked Qatada's bail at a hastily-arranged hearing earlier this week, says in the written text of his decision – which was made public on Thursday – that he will have to consider releasing him on bail "if it is obvious after two or three weeks that deportation is not imminent".

Mitting's ruling also reveals how close the home secretary came to putting Qatada on a plane back to Jordan before this week's dispute over the deadline for last-minute appeal rights to the European court of human rights closed down that option.

The judge says in his ruling that there was a route by which the home secretary could have "short-circuited" the lengthy appeal opportunities in the British courts, which meant there was a "realistic prospect" that the long-run saga could have been brought to a rapid conclusion "within, at most, a matter of a very few weeks".

Labour home affairs spokeswoman, Diana Johnson, said that the ruling confirmed that because of "the home secretary's shambolic handling of the Abu Qatada case, he may be out on our streets within weeks". She added: "Additional avenues and delays have been opened up by the home secretary, all because she apparently got her dates wrong."

But May, whose handling of the affair came under severe criticism from MPs during an hour of Commons exchanges on Thursday, insisted that the government would "resist vigorously any application he might make to be released on bail".

The home secretary stressed, however, that the 22-hour curfew bail conditions that he had been on up until his televised re-arrest on Tuesday were "among the most stringent ever applied to anybody here in the United Kingdom".

Qatada's legal team, which includes Gareth Peirce, the leading defence solicitor in terror cases, has not yet declared its intentions but an application for his release from the top security unit at Belmarsh prison in London is widely expected shortly.

The dispute over whether the deadline for appeals to the Strasbourg court in the Qatada case was Monday or Tuesday night continued to rage on Thursday. May insisted that Qatada had no right to have his appeal accepted for consideration because it was lodged "out of time" at 11 pm French time on Tuesday night.

"The government is clear that Abu Qatada has no right to refer the case to the grand chamber of the European court of human rights, since the three-month deadline to do so lapsed at midnight on Monday," she told the Commons. The Home Office later published documents and a briefing note entitled "six facts that prove the government right" to support their claim that the three-month deadline passed at midnight, Monday 16 April rather than Tuesday 17 April.

But advice circulated by Labour from the Council of Europe, which oversees the Strasbourg court, suggested that Qatada's appeal may have been lodged "just in time".

An official at the secretariat of the Council of Europe sent a message to the House of Commons library regarding the appeal which said: "I would say that [the appeal was lodged] just in time, but of course the court may decide otherwise."

The dispute will be resolved by a panel of Strasbourg judges but it may be at least two months before they rule whether or not the 11th hour appeal should be heard and in the meantime any deportation proceedings remain frozen until a decision is made.

It may be that the home secretary is proved right on the timetable but she repeatedly declined to reveal in the Commons whether she had been officially advised to wait 24 hours before ordering Qatada's televised arrest on Tuesday to remove any doubt about the deadline, nor to explain why she had been unwilling to wait.

She only said that British officials had been in contact with the Strasbourg court and they had been "well aware" that the Home Office was working to a Monday midnight deadline. Strasbourg court officials told the Guardian on Wednesday that they believed the deadline had been on Tuesday night.

In Brighton, Clarke brushed aside judicial opposition to UK proposals for reforming the European court of human rights, claiming a declaration by 47 member countries would result in fewer cases being appealed to Strasbourg.

Dismissing criticism by the British judge Sir Nicholas Bratza, the court's president, Clarke insisted the "Brighton declaration" would speed up the process of tackling the backlog of more than 150,000 cases waiting to be heard.

But the justice secretary did concede that there had been opposition from other states within the Council of Europe and not as much progress had been made as the UK originally hoped.

"These reforms represent a substantial package and are a significant step towards realising the goals that the prime minister set out in Strasbourg," Clarke said following agreement on the text of the declaration which has been refined over months of negotiation.

"Taken together these changes should mean fewer cases being considered by the court. Those that it considers should be allegations of serious violations or major points of interpretation of the convention and will be processed without the scandalous delays we are seeing at present."

Source: The Guardian UK

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