As Pete said yesterday, the arrest and presumed deportation of Abu Qatada to Jordan is worth a cheer or two. So too is the fact that the British government orefers to act within the law, not outside it. The government insists it has received assurances from the Jordanians that Qatada will face a fair trial (or, perhaps more accurately, as fair a trial as can reasonably be expected). This is also worth a cheer, even if one cannot be wholly confident of the worth of these assurances.
Most of all, however, these developments are a victory for the too-often-maligned European Court of Human Rights. Granted, this assumes the Court will eventually rule that Qatada can be deported to his homeland but, presuming this is the case, far from impugning the court’s worth the Qatada saga justifies it.
Does anyone believe the Jordanians would have offered these assurances absent the court’s reluctance to permit the deportation of suspects to a country where the evidence used to obtain grounds for their prosecution may have been obtained by torture? Of course not.
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