John F. Burns
LONDON: A Palestinian-born cleric described by British security officials as "a significant international terrorist" lost the latest round in a seven-year battle to remain in Britain as a refugee Wednesday when the highest court in Britain ruled that he could be deported to Jordan, where he was convicted in absentia in a terrorist bombing and a bomb plot in the late 1990s.
After a five-judge panel of the Law Lords - judges in the House of Lords who sit as the highest court of appeal - unanimously approved his deportation, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith immediately signed an order for the deportation of the 48-year-old Islamic preacher known as Abu Qatada, who is being held in a special unit for Muslim militants at the Longlartin jail about 100 miles, or 160 kilometers, west of London.
The cleric's lawyers said that they would appeal the decision to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, a step likely to halt any move to deport the cleric for weeks, and possibly months.
Smith hailed the decision as a major victory for the government, which has been under pressure for years from opposition parties and hostile public opinion polls over what critics have described as its failure to effectively control immigration to Britain, and to deport Islamic militants who have taken sanctuary here. Smith described Abu Qatada as "a truly dangerous man," and added, "My priority is the safety of the country, and I want him removed as soon as possible."
The legal battle over the cleric, whose real name is Omar Mahmoud Mohammed Othman, has been closely watched in Britain. He settled in the country in 1993, when he successfully claimed asylum, and has a large family receiving welfare payments and living in a London home provided by the local council.
A favorite epithet of newspapers that have characterized him as a poster boy for failings in the immigration system has been drawn from a Spanish judge who sat in a terrorist case to which Othman was linked and described him as "Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe." Part of the British government's case against Othma has been that 18 videotapes of his sermons urging young Muslims to take up jihad were found in a Hamburg apartment used by 3 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
For the government and for rights groups, Othman's battle to remain in Britain has become a bellwether for a raft of other cases involving Islamic militants caught up in terrorist investigations.
The government - acknowledging that it lacks evidence likely to win convictions against them in British courts, or arguing that it cannot present its evidence in court because that would pose a risk of compromising intelligence sources - is seeking to deport a group of 11 other men, mainly from the Arab world, whom it describes as terrorist threats.
The central issue in these cases, as in Othman's, has been the contention of defense lawyers and rights groups that the evidence against the men was obtained from foreign governments under torture, or that the suspects risk being tortured by these governments if deported. To meet court challenges on the issue, Britain has negotiated agreements with several governments, including Jordan and Algeria, that they will not physically abuse terrorism suspects deported from Britain.
But those agreements had failed to persuade judges at earlier stages of the case against Othman in Britain until the Law Lords' ruling Wednesday. Further accentuating their intent to make their ruling a landmark in the battle over such cases, the Law Lords accompanied their decision in the Abu Qatada case with a separate ruling approving the deportation of two Algerian terrorism suspects, identified in court only as RB and U, whose appeals, like Abu Qatada's, centered on the threat of torture if they were returned to their homeland.
But spokesmen for rights groups said after the ruling they were hopeful that it would be overturned at the European court. Tim Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch, told the BBC that the Strasbourg court had shown in previous rulings that it did not believe that "diplomatic assurances" against torture were credible. Porteous said that the Law Lords had sent "a misguided message" to the government "that they can send people back to their countries on flimsy and unenforceable assurances that they will not be tortured."
Nicola Duckworth, a spokesman for Amnesty International, agreed.
"No one should be deported to face a risk of torture, whatever they might be alleged or suspected to have done," she said.
And Victoria Brittain, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper, in an online article posted immediately after the judgment, said that the Othman case, involving a man who has never been convicted of a crime in Britain, and a Law Lords' hearing at which "secret evidence" was heard behind closed doors were redolent of "the casual racism that allows our society to treat these men's human rights as different from our own."
The Law Lords said that the fact that another country may have used torture - in Othman's case, Jordan, in its investigation of the charges against him - was not cause enough for Britain to give sanctuary to a fugitive who might pose a security threat. Nicholas Phillips, the lord chief justice, said in his judgment that the prohibition in international law against using evidence obtained by torture "is not primarily because such evidence is unreliable or because the reception of the evidence will make the trial unfair," but because the state, in this case Britain, "must stand firm" against torture as a matter of principle.
"That principle applies to the state in which an attempt is made to adduce such evidence," Phillips said. "It does not require this state, the United Kingdom, to retain in this country, to the detriment of national security, a terrorist suspect. What is relevant is the degree of risk that Mr. Othman will suffer a flagrant denial of justice if he is deported to Jordan."
Snag in airline plot case
A judge Wednesday discharged the jury in the trial of a group of British Muslims accused of plotting to blow up trans-Atlantic passenger jets in midair, citing legal reasons, The Associated Press reported from London.
Eight men, aged 22 to 30, are on trial at the high-security Woolwich Crown Court in London. They all deny conspiracy to murder.
A new jury was expected to be sworn in soon. The case is likely to resume this week.
The foiling of the alleged plot led to travel chaos around the world, as hundreds of flights were grounded and thousands of people had their trips disrupted. It also triggered huge changes to airport security that persist to this day, including bans on carrying liquids aboard aircraft.
A court order restricts reporting of some details of the trial.
Published: February 18, 2009, International Herald Tribune
