The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg on Monday rejected a final request made by five terror suspects, including radical Islamic cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, to halt their extradition from Britain to the United States to face terrorism charges.
According to an ECHR statement, a panel of five judges on Monday rejected the application filed by the five suspects to refer their case to the Strasbourg court's upper Grand Chamber on grounds that their extradition to US would breach their human rights.
The judges also refused to re-open the cases of the five suspects, rejecting their claims of possible rights violations in the United States. The five defendants were attempting to appeal against an earlier ECHR ruling that approved their extradition to the United States.
"On 10 April 2012 the European Court of Human Rights held, in the case of Babar Ahmad and Others v. the United Kingdom, that there would be no violation of the applicants' rights if extradited to stand trial in the United States," the court said in a statement on Monday.
"On 9/10 July 2012, five of the applicants lodged a request for referral of the case to the Grand Chamber. Today the Grand Chamber Panel decided to reject the request. This means that the Chamber judgment of 10 April 2012 is now final," the statement added.
In their appeal heard by a seven-member ECHR judges panel in July, the five suspects had argued that the prospects of their solitary imprisonment in a US maximum security prison with the possibility of a life imprisonment would be in direct violation of their human rights.
Nevertheless, the ECHR judges panel unanimously rejected their appeal, and ruled their extradition to the United States permissible under EU laws as US prison conditions would not violate their human rights.
In their ruling issued in July, the ECHR judges panel said assurances provided by the US Justice Department as well as conditions at ADX Florence, a Federal supermax jail in Colorado, guaranteed that the rights of the suspects will not be violated while in the US.
The British Home Office welcomed Monday's ECHR decision not to refer the cases of Abu Hamza and four others to the Grand Chamber, with a spokesman saying: "This follows the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights on 10 April to allow the extradition of these five terrorism suspects to the US. We will work to ensure that the individuals are handed over to the US authorities as quickly as possible."
Masri is currently serving a seven-year sentence in UK for spreading racial hatred and urging his followers to murder non-Muslims. He has been fighting extradition to the US since the request was first filed in May 2004. He is blind in one eye and wears a hook in place of a hand he claims to have lost while fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He first came to Britain on a student visa and later acquired a British passport through marriage.
Egyptian-born Masri is wanted in the US for various terrorism charges, including funding terrorism, organizing a terrorist training camp in Oregon between 1998 and 2000 and helping in the kidnapping of 12 Westerners in Yemen in 1998. Haroon Aswat is also accused in connection with the Oregon training camp.
Two of the suspects, namely Babar Ahmad and Seyla Talha Ahsan, are accused of supporting terrorism by using a website operated in London. The remaining two, Adel Abdul Bary and Khaled al-Fawwaz, are accused of involvement in organizing the 1998 US Embassy bombings in East Africa.
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