The ECHR is right about Abu Hamza, but Britain still needs to leave

(Top from left) Abu Hamza, Haroon Rashid Aswat and Babar Ahmad, (bottom from left) Syed Talha Ahsan, Khaled al–Fawwaz and Adel Abdel Bary

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that six terror suspects can be extradited.

The famous hook-handed Abu Hamza, along with Babar Ahmad, Haroon Rashid Aswat, Seyla Talha Ahsan, Adel Abdul Bary and Khaled al-Fawwaz, will soon be off our hands for good.

Over £4 million of taxpayers' money has been spent keeping the men in British jails, paying for legal costs and keeping their families on benefits.

All are wanted on terror charges in the US, but have been able to spend years fighting extradition because some argue that supermax prison would amount to inhuman and degrading treatment under Article 3 of the Human Rights code.

Well, I’m sure we’ll all be horrified at the thought that men responsible for hundreds of innocent deaths, who have leached this country dry and filled Guardian column inches and Radio 4 minutes with sanctimonious drivel, might be treated inhumanely.

None of this should have been allowed to happen in the first place. We should give asylum to our friends, not our enemies, and there are deep and fundamental problems with that system.

But it also raises questions about the role of the European Court. And John Bolton, George Bush’s ambassador to the UN, said that Britain should renounce the jurisdiction of the court. He said:

It’s a question of what do British people want to do? Do you want to be an independent nation, or do you want to be a county in Europe?

This is just another example of Britain’s mistake in allowing European institutions to develop to the extent they have. It is yet another infringement on British sovereignty that undercuts its ability to co-operate with the United States.

It also calls into question the ability of Europe as a whole to be an effective partner in the war against terrorism.

The problem with the ECHR is not that just it is incredibly ineffective, with more than 100,000 pending cases, nor that by its very nature its prone to increasing its jurisdiction, nor that its understanding of “rights” are totally removed from those of the rest of humanity; but that by its very nature a supra-natural judiciary inevitably leads to an supra-natural government. Even if it was manned by the wisest men in Christendom, I would still not wish Britain to be a part of it.

Although the European Union and ECHR have always remained separate, the EU treats the Convention on Human Rights as its legal system and the EU’s European Court of Justice refers to the ECHR. The court is, in effect, another backdoor route to pooling sovereignty.

All these institutions were established after the Second World War with noble intentions, but international bodies have the tendency to become elitist, anti-democratic and unaccountable. British supporters of the ECHR take a perverse satisfaction in the unpopularity of rulings that give, for example, foreign terrorists a right to a family life, almost as if the virtue of liberalism lay in how disconnected it was from public perceptions of justice, without any sense that a legal system depends on public trust.

This snobbery partly explains the Eurocrats' instinctive dislike of the United States; the US has judicial activism but there is still far more popular control over justice, as well as politics, which is why their justice system is harsher. (On top of this one can add a naive European hope that it can remain above the problems of the Middle East.)

The US, in turn, has turned a blind eye to the essential anti-Americanism of European institutions. American governments of the 1960s supported British membership of the Common Market, and since then have varied between positive support and apathy. But as a rule, if a country wants to have more influence and power in the world it’s best to encourage as many countries to ape its political and legal system, since they are more likely to be allies; this is the self-interested side to neoconservatism, the otherwise (naively) altruistic policy of spreading liberal democracy around the world. In this sense the increasingly anti-democratic nature of European government, as shown in Greece and Italy, is bad news for the Americans.

A united Europe, especially with its energy dependence on the Middle East, is not necessarily in the United States’ interests. If I was an American politician I would want to give as much support as possible to opponents of EU membership, especially in the country most likely to withdraw – Britain.