US Supreme Court For Human Rights
By James Vicini
29 June, 2004
Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court severely limited the Bush administration's war on terrorism on Monday and allowed cases brought by terror suspects challenging their confinement to proceed in the American legal system.The surprising moves by the high court came in a series of term-ending decisions that pitted civil liberties concerns against national security arguments and marked a blow to President Bush's assertion of sweeping presidential powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In one ruling the court said the hundreds of foreign terror suspects at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba could turn to American courts to challenge their confinement. In another ruling it said an American held in his nation is entitled to procedural protections to contest his detention.
"Today's historic rulings are a strong repudiation of the administration's argument that its actions in the war on terrorism are beyond the rule of law and unreviewable by American courts," Steven Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union said.
Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the Guantanamo case, said, "This is a major victory for the rule of law and affirms the right of every person, citizen or noncitizen, detained by the United States to test the legality of his or her detention in a U.S. court."
By a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled American courts do have jurisdiction to consider the claims of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners who said in their lawsuits they were being held illegally in violation of their rights.
"What is presently at stake is only whether the federal courts have jurisdiction to determine the legality of the executive's potentially indefinite detention of individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of wrongdoing," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.
The ruling did not address the merits of the claims, but allowed the prisoners to pursue their lawsuits, which lower courts had dismissed.
Even though the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts have jurisdiction, the detainees still could face a long legal battle to prove their claims and to win their release or major changes in the conditions of their confinement.
In the second, more complicated ruling, the court divided by a 5-4 vote to rule that Bush has the power to detain American citizen Yaser Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan as a suspected Taliban fighter and who has been held in a U.S. military jail.
But in the more important part of the ruling, the justices by an 8-1 vote ruled he should get a fair opportunity to rebut the government's case for detaining him.
Bush's policies have been attacked by civil liberties and human rights groups, especially after recent revelations of U.S. abuse of Iraqi prisoners and questions on whether the U.S. government sought to condone torture during interrogations of terror suspects.
Some 595 foreign nationals, designated "enemy combatants," are being held at the base in Cuba as suspected al Qaeda members or Taliban fighters.
Most of those at Guantanamo were seized during the U.S.-led campaign against the Taliban government in Afghanistan and against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network after the Sept. 11 attacks. The first detainees arrived in January 2002.
All but a handful of those at the base are being held without being charged, without access to lawyers or their families and without access to courts or a proceeding of any kind.
In the Hamdi case, the court said the U.S. Congress authorized the detention of combatants in the narrow circumstances alleged in the case, but that he could challenge his detention -- a position at odds with what the Bush administration argued.
At least two court members -- Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- would have released Hamdi immediately.
They joined the main opinion by four other justices who said Hamdi should have a meaningful opportunity to offer evidence that he is not an enemy combatant.
The four, in an opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, said constitutional due process rights demand that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant must be given "a meaningful opportunity" to contest the basis for the detention before a neutral party.
In a third ruling, the court decided the case of terror suspect Jose Padilla on narrow procedural grounds, ruling he should have brought the challenge in South Carolina instead of New York, a decision that sidestepped whether Bush has the power to detain him.
© Copyright 2004, Reuters Ltd