I greatly admire Joshua Rozenberg's reporting but I question his approach to some recent court rulings (see [2008] Gazette, 17 April, 11).


When the Court of Appeal quashed the home secretary's decision to deport Abu Qatada to Jordan it did so because it recognised that in Jordan he would face a trial founded on evidence extracted under torture. Joshua agrees that their decision is consistent with the Chahal ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, recently confirmed in Saadi v Italy. Yet he says that the law lords should hear an appeal by the home secretary and, he implies, overrule the Court of Appeal.



There are good reasons why an appeal could be useful, for example, in questioning the judges' willingness to accept reliance on unmonitored and unenforceable 'memoranda of understanding' by which our government now claims that governments that they previously believed to practise torture routinely have suddenly renounced it.



Joshua, however, wants an appeal because 'otherwise the world's terrorists will simply flock to Britain'. This is alarmist and fanciful. It has long been our policy and our duty not to send people to be tortured, whoever they are, so the Court of Appeal has done nothing new. If people have committed crimes, they can be punished here.



Nor do we expect our judges to flout or bypass our own laws or our international obligations. Here I raise a broader objection. It makes lively copy to talk about a 'trial of strength' between ministers and judiciary but it misrepresents the inherent tension between legislative supremacy and the judiciary's duty to interpret and uphold the law. There have been a few ill-considered criticisms of judges by a few politicians, but in general judges have been scrupulous in reconciling human rights obligations with the demands of security.



The Gentle case, described in the piece, is a good example. Judges are not engaged in a battle with Parliament. They are doing their job. Joshua refers to one judge as 'a member of the awkward squad' and to the inherited 'sense of social justice' which another 'inherited' from his father. There may be a place for humour and a light touch in his column, but I believe he is wrong to trivialise and personalise so serious an issue which goes to the very root of our constitution.



Geoffrey Bindman, London