Sandy 4 St Albans

The views of the Telegraph’s chief political commentator Peter Oborne are always interesting.  His defence in that paper of the European Convention on Human Rights, prompted by the uproar over Abu Qatada,  is robust and cogent – see http://tgr.ph/yEqlU9

Here are some choice extracts:

There is nothing on this earth more British than the instinct to stand up for the underdog or the pariah, however unpopular or unattractive he or she might be. And there is no institution – not even the MCC or the Lawn Tennis Association – more British than the European Court of Human Rights.

It was inspired by Sir Winston Churchill, eager in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust to export the British system of fairness and decency. Churchill ensured that its founding document was drafted by a British politician, David Maxwell Fyfe, later to become a Conservative Lord Chancellor. Every single one of the great ideas that were to be embodied in the European Convention – freedom from torture, restraint on the power of the state, freedom under law – was an ancient British principle transferred on to the European stage.

It should be a matter of enormous national pride that an institution so profoundly British in its inspiration has refused to send an Arab fundamentalist (however despicable his crimes are alleged to be) to Jordan, where he might be tortured, or at best face the prospect of being sent to jail on the back of evidence acquired from a torture victim.

Oborne goes on to quote Churchill’s great “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, where he defended the Western tradition of the rule of law, and comments that today “Churchill might be denounced as some eccentric, mad-eyed human rights fanatic.”

Maybe the government can get adequate guarantees from Jordan that the evidence of torture victims will not be used against Abu Qatada if he is deported back there.  I understand there are all sorts of problems with putting him on trial in the United Kingdom because it might expose some of the mechanisms used to track potential terrorists, and we have to find a way through that if possible.

But our concern that certain intelligence-gathering methods should not be publicised in open court cannot justify ill-informed pot-shots at one of the key foundations of our liberty.  I agree with Peter Oborne.