Theresa May gave a defiant statement to the house on the Special Immigration Appeals Committee’s (SIAC) decision to uphold Abu Qatada’s appeal against deportation to Jordan on grounds that he would not receive a fair trial. She vowed to fight on by ‘appealing the decision’, which prompts the question: how will she do that?
It’s necessary to understand what the SIAC considered (here is its judgment and here is a précis). First, it examined whether or not evidence given by Qatada’s former co-defendants in an earlier trial (from which Qatada was absent), Abu Hawsher and Al-Hamasher, is admissible in Qatada’s retrial. This question is not initially concerned with whether the evidence was obtained under torture, merely if it is admissible under Jordanian law. Jordanian law cannot answer the question; so the SIAC declined to reached a decision, ruling that ‘until and unless the [Jordanian] Court of Cassation gives an authoritative ruling on the question, it must remain open.’
An obvious route, then, is for the Home Office not to appeal the SIAC’s decision but rather to change the case’s facts (and therefore start a new deportation process, perhaps with a higher chance of success) by convincing the Jordanians to change the law so that, in the words of the SIAC’s judgment, ‘statements made to a public prosecutor by accomplices who are no longer subject to criminal proceedings cannot be admitted probatively against a returning fugitive.
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