Abu Qatada (Deportation)

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 8th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The entire House should strongly welcome the work that the Home Secretary and her junior Minister have done to get Abu Qatada finally on a plane back to Jordan to stand fair trial. This is a good result for not just the Home Secretary, but the country. In his home country, Abu Qatada stands accused of plotting terror attacks against a school and tourists, and it is right that he should stand trial for those offences and for justice to be done.

After Abu Qatada was granted asylum in this country in 1994, he began preaching hatred and praising terror attacks. He is a dangerous man whose values we in this Parliament condemn, and that is why successive Home Secretaries—Labour and Conservative—have worked to deport him with the cross-party support of the House and that of the country. I strongly welcome the work of the Home Office and the Foreign Office to keep pursuing the case over many years, and we should also welcome the work of the Jordanian Government and Parliament to pass the treaties that were needed.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) agreed the first memorandum of understanding with Jordan in 2005, which led to the agreement of the British courts that Abu Qatada could be deported without the threat of torture, and the Home Secretary rightly built on that agreement after the 2012 European Court judgment. She was also right to pursue the legal route, rather than listening to those who urged her to ignore the law. Without the rule of law, we are not free.

We should be in no doubt, however, that the case has taken far too long, so change is needed to deal with such unacceptable and costly delays. The attempt to deport Abu Qatada started in 2005. It took three years for his case to reach the Court of Appeal, another year for it to reach the Law Lords and a further three years for it to reach the European Court, and it is a further 18 months since then. That is far too long—too long in the British courts and then too long in the European Court.

We will examine the Home Secretary’s proposal that layers of appeal should be removed for immigration cases, because we believe that the process needs to be speeded up and that slow justice is in no one’s interests, but I urge her and the Secretary of State for Justice to consider the practical and administrative reasons why such cases take so long. The European Court now has a backlog of 150,000 cases and badly needs major reform. However, Ministers promised progress while Britain chaired the Council of Europe, yet little of substance was achieved. The borders inspectorate has said that a quarter of foreign criminals are sent home and a third are given leave to remain, but that 40% are not deported simply for administrative and bureaucratic reasons, so those cases need to be tackled.

The Home Secretary referred to the qualified right to a family life under article 8 which can be used in immigration cases, on which we have supported the Government, although that was clearly not the issue in the Abu Qatada case. She concluded by saying that she wanted to abolish the Human Rights Act and to consider withdrawing from the European convention, yet she herself has drawn on the Human Rights Act. She used it to prevent Gary McKinnon from being deported to the USA, but without the Act, she would have had no legal justification for doing so. It is unclear whether she wants no Bill of Rights at all, which would consequently mean that there would be little restriction on what the Home Secretary’s decisions could be, but will she confirm that the Government’s commission on a draft British Bill of Rights has replicated article 3 of the Human Rights Act, on the absolute prohibition of torture? As she knows, the central issue in the Abu Qatada case was always torture, which is something that we in Britain have always abhorred, so ditching the Human Rights Act and replacing it with her British Bill of Rights would have made no difference in that case.

The Home Secretary made much in her statement of the importance for us, as a civilised nation, of not acting outside the law. However, if we were to resile from the European convention, what signal would it send to those countries that we are trying to persuade to adopt higher standards of human rights and to follow the convention, such as Russia, regarding the criminal justice system, and Turkey, regarding the treatment of Kurds?

The Government have done immensely important work in the Abu Qatada case: deporting a dangerous man; delivering new legal deportation agreements so that we can remove people to Jordan and elsewhere, with new protection against torture in Jordan; and showing the British Government’s determination to pursue what is right while respecting the rule of law and having no truck with torture. The Home Secretary rightly claimed credit for all those things in her statement, and reforms are needed to deal with the problems of this case. We are pleased that Abu Qatada has finally been deported and we cannot have such delays in the future, but she should put forward her reforms without ripping up the things that she has just achieved.

[Mrs May]

I thank the right hon. Lady for the references that she made to the success in deporting Abu Qatada, and for saying that the Labour Opposition will look very seriously at the proposals that we bring forward in the immigration Bill. The Opposition supported changes to the immigration rules in relation to the interpretation of article 8, and we were grateful to them for that. Sadly, a number of judges have not heard Parliament in the way that all of us hoped. I hope that we will have support on the immigration Bill, because I think these changes are important.

The right hon. Lady mentioned the administrative reasons for the lack of deportation, and issues around the speed with which these cases are dealt with in the courts. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice is looking at that issue, because we all want to make sure that we can deal with these cases properly—with people having proper rights of appeal, so that we can ensure that their case is heard—but can deport people rather more quickly.

The right hon. Lady then sadly spent quite a bit of her response on the Human Rights Act, my views on it, and what might happen in the future in relation to it. I make two points in response. First, what she fails to appreciate is the concern that Government Members have about the role of Parliament in setting laws that operate in the United Kingdom. That is one of the issues that we are looking at in relation to the European Court and its ability to deal with cases that are taken through the courts in the UK. Secondly, she rather churlishly suggested that nothing happened when we chaired the Council of Europe. A considerable amount of work was put in by the former Justice Secretary, the Attorney-General and others, and it led to the Brighton declaration, which is bringing about change in the way in which the European Court operates, so that is another success for this Government, who took that opportunity to make some changes.

My final point is very simple. Members of the public cannot understand why, under the human rights laws that we currently operate, somebody who is a threat to this country is able to remain in it, year after year, without being deported. Frankly, if the right hon. Lady cannot understand that, she simply does not get it, and will not get an opportunity to be on the Government side of the House.