Home secretary faces ridicule in Commons over disagreement about deadline for cleric's deportation appeal
The embarrassed home secretary, Theresa May, has spent more than an hour under fire in the Commons over her handling of the "chaotic" deportation of the radical Islamist cleric Abu Qatada.
She was even mocked for "partying with X Factor judges" on Tuesday night while Qatada's lawyers were busy submitting their last-minute 11pm appeal to the European court of human rights.
Labour MPs repeatedly criticised the home secretary for not waiting 24 hours before pressing ahead on Tuesday with her fresh attempt to deport Qatada, amid evidence of confusion over whether the Strasbourg deadline for appeals had expired.
She also faced anger from her own backbenchers that the actions of a European court had again thwarted the attempted deportation of a terror suspect and demands that she simply put him on a plane to Jordan and ignore the legal injunctions.
The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, accused May of turning chaos and confusion into farce and not knowing what day of the week it was. "On the Tuesday night deadline, the home secretary, who thought it was Monday, partied with X Factor judges, while Abu Qatada was appealing to European judges," she said.
The row over whether the home secretary blundered in her handling of the Qatada deportation comes as Britain opens its prestigious 47-nation Council of Europe conference in Brighton to agree reforms to the work of the Strasbourg court.
May insisted she had been right that the deadline of three calendar months after the 17 January date of delivery of the original Strasbourg judgment on the case was midnight on Monday. "It is a matter of simple mathematics," she told a crowded chamber.
But Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, and other Labour MPs cited two previous Strasbourg rulings – Otto v Germany and Praha v Czech Republic – casting doubt on that conclusion. Both rulings show that the Strasbourg court counts its deadlines from the day after a judgment is delivered rather from the day on which it is delivered.
The home secretary dismissed these precedents as irrelevant as they involved initial referrals to the court rather than appeals to its grand chamber. But she did tell MPs that the minimum effect of this week's events would be to delay Qatada's deportation for at least another two months while a panel of Strasbourg judges met to decide whether his appeal was made in time.
May went on to muddy the waters by insisting to Labour MPs that delaying this week's televised arrest and detention of Qatada by 24 hours would not have made any difference because the Strasbourg judges had the discretion to decide whether or not to accept late appeals.
The home secretary stood by her claim that Qatada's appeal should now be thrown out by the Strasbourg court because it was made after the deadline. She was repeatedly pressed on whether she had been officially advised to wait 24 hours and whether the question of the precise deadline had been clarified with Strasbourg.
May said Home Office civil servants had been in repeated contact with Strasbourg officials about the case. "It was always clear we were working to a deadline of Monday," she said, but failed to clarify whether those Strasbourg officials agreed. The court's press office told the Guardian on Wednesday that the deadline had always been Tuesday at midnight.