Theresa May must have found it galling to use the despised Human Rights Act as a get-out-of-jail-free card for Gary McKinnon. But there was no alternative to her using article 3 of the human rights convention, which says that no one shall be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
How else was she going to be able to stop McKinnon being extradited to the US, with the risk that he would end his own life and, with it, May's political career?
"I have concluded that the ordering of his extradition and his subsequent removal would give rise to such risk to his health and, in particular, to a high risk of his ending his life that a decision to that effect would be incompatible with his human rights under article 3," May told MPs.
The Extradition Act 2003, brought in by Labour in a vain attempt to stop lengthy legal delays, had taken away the home secretary's discretion to block extradition on what were seen as political grounds. The reforms also ensured that the courts were left with little or no discretion to block extradition once the formalities had been complied with.
So the home secretary was left in the unenviable position of trying to block extradition requests that were politically unacceptable without any legal powers to do so. Hence her decision that McKinnon was too ill to be extradited.
That recalls Jack Straw's decision in 2000 that the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was unfit to stand trial in Spain for human rights abuses, made while the home secretary still had the discretion to block extradition.
As May told MPs, "matters such as representations on human rights grounds" will be given to the courts under planned new legislation. She clearly doesn't want to find herself under political pressure of this sort in future.
Already, the home secretary is being asked why she was not persuaded by the medical evidence put forward by Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad or any of the other suspected terrorists extradited to the US earlier this month.
Even more significantly, parliament will be asked to approve a new forum bar, allowing the courts to block extradition if they decide that it would be in the interests of justice for defendants to be tried in the UK instead.
"This will mean that where prosecution is possible in both the UK and in another state, the British courts will be able to bar prosecution overseas, if they believe it is in the interests of justice to do so," May said.
What's meant by that is not clear. It would be possible, for example, to try McKinnon in the UK — but only if the US government were willing to send witnesses to an English court who could give evidence about security systems in the Pentagon, which must be highly unlikely.
The government review headed by Sir Scott Baker was told by the specialist extradition judges in London that there was not a single case decided under the 2003 Act in which it would have been in the interests of justice to have tried in the UK, rather than in the requesting territory.
Many of the recent cases involving extradition to the US were ones that the Crown Prosecution Service was simply not interested in taking up. If the only test is whether a prosecution is "possible", some defendants will escape both extradition and prosecution.
What we do know is that the government is not going to implement the forum bar provided by the Police and Justice Act 2006, which has never been brought into force. The Scott Baker review said the major disadvantage of introducing that forum bar was that it would create delay and had the potential to generate satellite litigation.
"This would slow down the extradition process, add to the cost of proceedings and provide no corresponding benefit," the review added.
Without seeing the government's proposals, it is difficult to see how May's new forum bar "will be carefully designed to minimise delays". The most that can be said is that giving these powers to the courts would avoid lengthy challenges in the courts to decisions by the home secretary.
The government's concern will be to satisfy its critics while causing as little damage as possible to relations with the United States. It's possible to imagine a forum bar that would be inconsistent with the US-UK extradition treaty.
Fortunately for May, though, the English courts moved quickly in permitting the extradition of Abu Hamza and his fellow suspects this month. If the US get to try the five terrorist suspects and we get to keep a man who says he was searching for UFOs, perhaps honour will be satisfied.