Judges award Abu Qatada £2,500 compensation for 'unfair' detention

The radical preacher Abu Qatada was awarded compensation of £2,500 today by European judges who ruled that his detention without trial after the 9/11 attacks was a breach of his human rights.

The controversial award came just 24 hours after Abu Qatada lost the latest round of his legal battle to stay in Britain with the House of Lords ruling he could be deported to Jordan to face trial.

Ten other detainees – none of which were named by the court – also received similar modest cash awards.

The judges at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg said the damages were lower than awards granted in previous cases of unlawful detention given that the 11 were held in the face of a “public emergency”.
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Abu Qatada and the 10 other suspects were rounded up in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

However, the judges said that even allowing for the special circumstances, the terms of the detention violated three provisions of the Human Rights Convention – the right to liberty and security, the right to have the lawfulness of detention decided by a court and the right to compensation for unlawful detention.

The judges rejected a fourth complaint, however, declaring that the detention of Abu Qatada and the others did not amount to a violation of a Human Rights Convention ban on “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment”.

Today’s ruling acknowledged that, at the time of the detentions, “there had been a public emergency threatening the life of the nation”. However, it said the issue was whether the legal measures [the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001] adopted by the Government in response were “strictly required by the exigencies of the situation”.

The judges said that, when someone is detained on the basis of “an allegedly reasonable suspicion of unlawful behaviour”, that person must be given an opportunity effectively to challenge the allegations.

At the time, the Government considered there was an urgent need to protect the UK population from terrorist attack and a strong public interest in obtaining information about al-Qaeda and its associates, and keeping the sources of such information secret.

Balanced against that, went on the judges, was the detainees’ rights to “procedural fairness”.

Yesterday’s ruling that Abu Qatada could be deported was a significant victory for the Home Office’s policy – condemned by human rights groups – of relying on guarantees from foreign governments that deported suspects will not face torture or inhumane treatment on return home.

Including the Abu Qatada case, the Home Office is pursuing 12 deportation cases involving terror suspects in British prisons, some of which involve Jordan and Algeria, where the Lords ruled two others can also be deported.

However, Abu Qatada, 48, is expected to remain in the UK for up to two years as he is likely to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in a last attempt to avoid being deported.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle5765126.ece