US court's Guantanamo U-turn
2004-06-29 07:45
Washington - The US Supreme Court stirred up a hornet's nest of legal and political issues with its ruling on Monday that the government could not hold some 600 foreigners in a judicial black hole in Cuba as suspected terrorists.
The court ruled that US courts had jurisdiction to hear appeals by inmates held at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay challenging their designation as "enemy combatants" ineligible for usual US legal rights.
Most of the prisoners, captured during the Afghan war in 2001, have spent more than two years in secret detention without access to lawyers. Six have been slated to appear before a military tribunal and only three of those actually charged.
The high court's decision marked a turning point for these prisoners as well as a sharp setback for the Bush administration's anti-terrorist policies that had been criticised for short-circuiting civil liberties in the name of national security.
Steven Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the ruling, along with a similar judgment issued on Monday in the case of a Saudi-raised American held on US soil, were "enormously important".
Unprecedented claim
The court rejected "the government's really unprecedented claim that because he was engaging in a war against terror, the president as commander-in-chief can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants to whomever he wants without any meaningful review by any of the other branches of government", Shapiro said.
Judge John Gibbons, who argued the inmates' case before the Supreme Court, said the justices had asserted "unequivocally the executive branch may not maintain a no-law zone anywhere in the world".
Lawyers for the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), who filed the complaint that produced Monday's ruling, said their first step would now be to ask the government for permission to visit their clients.
In future proceedings, the government will be obliged to justify the detentions, said the group, which represents about a dozen inmates and remains in contact with the families of some 50 others.
"It is now incumbent upon the United States to demonstrate on an individual basis, through a fair process, that they have a right to detain these people," said CCR lawyer Joe Margulies.
If the Pentagon starts to free or transfer a large number of the prisoners to their respective governments, "it will mean they had not enough evidence to keep them", Margulies said.
Legal experts said the decisions represented a stunning reversal for President George W Bush's approach to his war on terror.
"The Guantanamo Bay case is not just a loss, it's an embarrassing loss in the face of overwhelming criticism domestically and internationally," said law professor Jonathan Turley, who teaches at George Washington University here.
"It turns out that his (Bush's) critics had been correct all along."