| The news earlier this month that the Jordanian cleric Abu Qatada had been bailed under conditions that restrict him to 22-hour detention, under effective house arrest, attracted lurid headlines.
Typical was a report in the Metro, which headlined the story: “Wanted terrorist wins bail battle.” The paper followed up with “An extremist once described as ‘Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe’ was granted bail by an immigration tribunal.”
There was added spice to the story because the former hostage in Iraq, Professor Norman Kember, had put up some of the bail money. (Mr Qatada had made a video at the time of the latter’s kidnap, asking for his release.) Professor Kember said that, if Mr Qatada had been convicted in a fair trial, he should serve a sentence; but he offered to help because he felt the cleric had been in prison for a long time without facing trial in a UK court.
“If you want to keep him in jail, you have to have good reasons for doing it. Otherwise al-Qaeda have you, if you don’t follow your process of justice,” he said.
Professor Kember’s point goes to the heart of the question: the right to trial by jury. Mr Qatada and a number of “terror suspects” from various countries have never been brought before an accredited court of law to answer charges. Indeed, none have even been questioned about what they are supposed to have done. Nor have the lawyers representing them been told what their clients have been accused of.
Mr Qatada is wanted by the Jordanian authorities, just as many who flee their homelands looking for asylum in the UK are wanted. The granting of full refugee status in the UK, as happened to Mr Qatada in 1994, is usually a tacit recognition from the British Government that such charges are questionable.
THE QATADA CASE represents the tip of a judicial iceberg. A number of foreign nationals have been detained in the UK without trial for most of the past seven years. It all began after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.
The British Government rushed through the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act (ATCSA), which allowed foreign nationals, who cannot be deported as “suspected international terrorists” or “a national security risk”, to be detained indefinitely without trial on the basis of evidence that they are not allowed see. Mr Qatada was one of 12 men picked up and interned at this time.
In December 2004, the House of Lords ruled the ATCSA to be incompatible with the Human Rights Act. Another Prevention of Terrorism Act, passed the following March, brought in a system of control orders, which restricted movement and association, effectively placing suspects under house arrest. Mr Qatada was one of those placed under a control order in March 2005.
After the London bombings on 7 July 2005, he and a number of others were again imprisoned, and served with deportation orders, as a threat to national security. Then, on 9 April this year, the Court of Appeal decided that neither Mr Qatada nor two Libyans (known only as DD and AS), could be deported, because they could face torture at home.
As part of the Government’s attempts to get a number of people deported to their countries of origin, it sought Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) that would guarantee their safety. The MoUs have been dismissed by Amnesty International. “They are inappropriate because they are discriminatory and corrosive of the absolute prohibition against torture and other ill-treatment. They are inadequate because they are inherently unreliable and practically ineffective,” a spokesperson said.
Amnesty suggests that the fact that such an arrangement has to be entered into reveals the dangers faced by people who return to those countries. To underline the point, Gareth Peirce, a solicitor who represents several of the men, highlighted how, in the case of Libya, the independent monitor whom Britain approved as a guarantor of the men’s safety was the Ghadafi Foundation, headed by Colonel Ghadafi’s son.
There is also a salutary tale to be told about a number of Algerian terror suspects who have found themselves in a similar position. There has been no pretence of MoUs with the Algerians, but two men
who did accept the assurances of safety upon return have lived to
regret it.
Having been detained in Britain for some years, Benaissa Taleb and Rida Dendani agreed to return to Algeria voluntarily, believing that they would not be detained for more than a few hours on arrival. The British diplomat who organised their deportations had promised that there was no risk they would be held by the Algerian secret police.
“They were both interrogated for 12 days, during which they were threatened and subjected to serious physical ill-treatment,” says Ms Peirce. “They were then charged, tried, and, some months later convicted, on the basis of the ‘confessions’ forced from them during this time. Dendani was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment; Taleb to three.”
Britain has “secretly been willing to disregard the most basic principles of refugee protection”. Confidential information regarding Benaissa Taleb’s asylum claim was passed to the Algerian government, Ms Peirce says. This may also have happened in other cases.
The magnitude of these actions has yet to register with the wider public. “Asylum rests on the central premise of confidentiality,” Ms Peirce says. “A clear promise to that effect is given by the Home Office to all those who claim asylum here. After all, the contents of the application, or the very fact of its having been made, might create danger for the applicant if he returned to his country of origin.”
What these examples illustrate is just how far down the line the British Government has gone in ignoring international agreements and denying the most basic of human rights. Some have been detained indefinitely without trial, while others who came to Britain seeking sanctuary have found that information they gave to justify residency has been handed over to those from whom they fled in the first place. It is a sad indictment of British justice.
Paul Donovan is a writer on social questions.
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