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Taking liberties
Anyone who believes that Tony Blair is an elected dictator corrupted
by his absolute power should look at the half-exasperated,
half-piteous comments he scrawled on the official papers which
discussed whether one Hani Youssef could and should be deported.
The case was from 1999, but the detail of the convulsions in
Whitehall only came out last year, when with great frankness Mr
Justice Field in the High Court published the views of everyone in
the bureaucracy from the Prime Minister downwards.
Youssef was an Egyptian lawyer who arrived in Britain in 1994
claiming that he had been tortured by the police because he
represented Islamist clients. The Home Office being the way it is,
civil servants took four years to process his claim for asylum and
then rejected it. According to the evidence seen by the High Court,
the security services warned the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw,
that Youssef was a senior member of the Islamic Jihad terrorist
group. In addition to organising atrocities, it had declared that it
was the duty of Muslims to kill Americans and their military and
civilian allies, including, presumably, British troops and
civilians.
By then Youssef was in prison. He and three other Egyptians were
held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The charges were
dropped. He was released only to be rearrested and locked away for
reasons of national security while the authorities decided whether
to send him back to Egypt.
You may think he had no right to be here. His asylum claim had
failed. He had no links with Britain. But the British government
couldn't bundle him on to the next flight to Cairo because the
policy was then and remains today that no-one should be deported to
face torture or execution.
The British ambassador in Cairo asked the Egyptians for guarantees.
He wanted rather a lot of them. There must be no ill treatment.
Youssef and three other Egyptians, who were also suspected of being
members of Islamic Jihad, must be informed of the accusations
against them. They must have time to prepare their defence, examine
witnesses and pick lawyers.
British officials must be allowed to visit them in prison and
British solicitors must be allowed to advise them. At the end of it
all, they must receive a fair and public trial in front of an
impartial and independent judge in a civilian court. Even if they
were then found guilty of a capital offence, they mustn't be
sentenced to death. In short, the ambassador was asking the
Egyptians to create the British legal system on one of its good
days. Trouble was inevitable.
Very few governments admit that they torture suspects and rig
trials. Very few governments admit that they do anything other than
preside over lands of liberty where human rights are revered and a
robust judiciary keeps state power in its place. Reports of abuse
are dismissed according to the nature of the regime as the
fabrications of communists, Trotskyists, outside agitators,
imperialists, neo-conservatives, wreckers, lunatics, unappeasable
malcontents, sensation-seeking journalists, attention-seeking
egotists, shyster lawyers, religious fundamentalists, liberal
fundamentalists, the corporate media, the corrupt opposition, the
CIA, MI5, the Vatican, the gay mafia, the freemasons and the Jews
(or the 'Zionists' as it is more delicately phrased today).
If the Egyptians offered guarantees that Youssef would receive a
fair trial, they would have admitted that other suspects who weren't
protected by the British government didn't receive a fair trial. The
Egyptian interior minister was furious and said the demands for
written assurances 'constitute an interference in the scope of the
Egyptian judicial system and an infringement on Egyptian national
sovereignty'.
The case was referred to Downing Street. A clearly bemused Prime
Minister read the list of guarantees his government was seeking and
wrote: 'This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?' John
Sawyers, Tony Blair's private secretary, told the Home Office that
the PM could see 'no obvious reason why British officials need to
have access to Egyptian nationals held in prison in Egypt, or why
the four should have access to a UK-based lawyer. Can we not narrow
down the list of assurances we require?'
They could, but only with the gentlest of cuts. In his absence,
Youssef had been sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour by
a military court. The British demand that the death penalty be ruled
out seemed to have come about in practice. But as Straw wrote to
Blair, unless there was more, there was no chance that the British
courts would allow the men to be sent to Egypt.
'There is, unfortunately, ample evidence from a range of sources of
serious human rights abuses in Egypt. The risk to Islamic activists,
in particular, is well documented. Indeed, three of the four men
submitted plausible claims of harassment and torture at the hands of
the Egyptian authorities.' The judges would block deportation unless
they were given cast-iron assurances.
By the time he received Straw's note, the Prime Minister was giving
a convincing impersonation of Victor Meldrew. Here were four
Egyptians who were accused of belonging to a fanatical cult. They
had no right to be in Britain, but the greater the suspicions about
them the more certain it was that they would be allowed to stay.
Whitehall was caught by a version of Catch 22 . If the suspects were
men accused of trivial crimes by the Egyptians, they could be
deported. But because they were accused of serious crimes, and by
extension could be suspected of being a menace to Britain, the
mighty British government couldn't get rid of them. 'This is crazy,'
Blair scrawled on Straw's letter. 'Why can't we press on?'
The government pressed on. 'The Prime Minister is not content simply
to accept that we have no option but to release the four
individuals,' his private secretary told Whitehall. The Red Cross
was asked to help. Ambassadors lobbied, lawyers opined and Blair
wrote to Egypt's President Mubarak. All for nothing.
As is often the way with dictatorships, the Egyptians made clear
that if their ghastly human rights record became a public issue it
wouldn't be their fault but the fault of the British government. The
ambassador said the wise course would be to let the men out quietly
and avoid a public fuss. They were. To add insult to the
government's injury, Mr Justice Field ruled that Youssef had been
unlawfully detained for two weeks and may be entitled to
compensation.
Last week Charles Clarke, the new Home Secretary, told the Times
that he wanted to strike deals with Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and
Jordan to allow the 12 Arab terror suspects indefinitely interned
without trial or charge to be deported. He would seek 'memorandums
of understanding' to stop them facing torture and the death penalty.
Clarke is looking for a way to deal with last month's devastating
ruling by eight of the nine Law Lords that detention was a breach of
just about every human rights law going. David Blunkett would
probably have ignored the judges and gone into his prolier-than-thou
routine about pampered airy-fairy liberals in their Hampstead
mansions not having the common sense to know what plain, decent folk
wanted to be done with foreign terror suspects. But Clarke is a son
of a senior civil servant who was educated at Highgate and King's
College, Cambridge. He's a man of the old establishment and the Law
Lords denunciation will have hurt.
All I would say is the Youssef case shows that deals are impossible.
Even when the full weight of Whitehall is thrown into trying to
strike one, they can't be made to work. The men in Belmarsh will
either have to be released or put on trial as, surely, Abu Qatada,
the world's leading theological excuse-maker for Jihad, can be.
In the long-run the only solution is for the global move towards
democracy to get moving again. In these strange times, the only
person who believes that this is possible or desirable is George W
Bush. In his inauguration address last week he announced that the
'survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success
of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is
the expansion of freedom in all the world.' And was feared and hated
by right-thinking people the world over for saying so.
Source: The Observer
23 January 2005
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