Judgments involving Abu Qatada are a bit like buses: you wait ages for one to turn up and then two come along together.

Last Wednesday, the home secretary won her appeal to the House of Lords against a ruling that the radical Muslim cleric could not be deported to stand trial in Jordan. That struck me as a wise ruling by the law lords, and one that you might think the Daily Mail would have reported prominently.

Instead, under the headline ‘Preacher of Hate Hits the Jackpot’, the newspaper splashed on Thursday with the news that Abu Qatada and ten other suspected foreign terrorists were ‘in line for "crazy" compensation payments’ from the taxpayer. Readers were left with the impression that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would award each of the former detainees a ‘fortune’ worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The Mail is much admired by other papers, which rushed to follow its lead. So when Abu Qatada was awarded less than £2,500 – and the other 10 detainees were given sums ranging from nearly £3,500 to nothing at all – the story received much less coverage than it deserved. Perhaps that was what the Home Office – which had presumably briefed the home affairs editor at the Mail – had wanted all along.

What was interesting about last week’s ruling was the deference shown by the Strasbourg judges to the law lords’ decision of December 2004 – the famous ‘Belmarsh’ judgment that declared the indefinite detention of suspected foreign terrorists incompatible with human rights.

Dismissing the detainees’ claim that detaining them breached the ban on inhuman and degrading treatment in article 3 of the convention, the Strasbourg judges found that the men could challenge both their detention and the conditions under which they were held. This was in line with a finding by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), Britain’s anti-terrorist court, which the law lords had not questioned.

The ECHR also followed the law lords’ rather reluctant conclusion that, a couple of months after terrorists attacked the US on 11 September 2001, there was a ‘public emergency’ in Britain ‘threatening the life of the nation’. It is only if such an emergency exists that states may ‘derogate from’, or refuse, rights such as article 5(1), which protects liberty.

I was never convinced that the ‘life of the nation’ was threatened at that time. Neither was Lord Bingham, the senior law lord. Nor, famously, was Lord Hoffmann, who said the ‘real threat’ came from ‘laws such as these’. But most of the law lords were prepared to accept that such an emergency existed and the Strasbourg judges did not contradict them.

That, in itself, is not enough. States can derogate in times of emergency ‘only to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation’. The law lords found that the derogating measures went too far in discriminating against foreign nationals. It followed that there had been a breach of article 5(1). Last week, the European judges gratefully agreed.

The ECHR went further in finding some breaches of article 5(4), the right to have the lawfulness of one’s detention decided by a court. This was because detainees had not been given enough information about the allegations against them to challenge these allegations effectively.

That part of the ruling was seen by the campaign group Justice as casting doubt on the special advocate procedure, under which security-cleared lawyers make submissions on behalf of detainees with whom they cannot communicate. Next week, a special panel of nine law lords will consider whether the use of special advocates in control order proceedings is consistent with article 6, the right to a fair trial. Control orders – ‘gag and tag’ restrictions – replaced detention without trial in 2005.

Article 5(5) provides an enforceable right to compensation for unlawful detention. This could not be awarded by the law lords since their powers were limited to declaring English law incompatible with article 5, as indeed they did. Basing their claims on decided cases, detainees who had been held for the full three-and-a-quarter years sought up to £240,000. Abu Qatada, who had evaded arrest for nearly a year, claimed nearly £175,000.

But the Strasbourg court had a great deal of sympathy for Britain’s attempts to reconcile the need for public protection with its obligation not to send people to countries where they risked torture. If the suspects had not been detained, they might still have been subjected to other restrictions – as they subsequently were when control orders were introduced. These reasons, said the court, justified ‘substantially lower’ compensation than would otherwise have been awarded.

It was a refreshingly realistic ruling from the ECHR. The men were clearly entitled to some recompense for their unlawful detention. But there was no need to pay them any more than what another of the detainees, Abu Rideh, dismissed as ‘rubbish money’.

The law lords’ decision last week allowing Abu Qatada to stand trial in Jordan was equally realistic. As I wrote in a column for the Gazette in May last year, there comes a time when our judges should stop trying to police other countries’ courts. I would be surprised if the Strasbourg court blocks Abu Qatada’s deportation or even delays it for too long.

And I’m not the only one who thinks that instant attacks on the law lords’ ruling by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Justice and the Guardian were ‘misconceived and unfair’. That’s also the view of Lord Lester QC, the father of human rights law in Britain. The tide is turning, and not just in Strasbourg.