Feisty Aphrodite Archives
High Court Sides with Guantanamo Detainees
The following is from the article written by Ali Gharib, published by Inter Press Service:
Rights groups lauded a U.S. Supreme Court ruling Thursday that reinstated the principle of habeas corpus for detainees at the prison for terrorism suspects in the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba.
The latest in a series of setbacks to Pres. George W. Bush administration's policies on terrorism suspects asserted that prisoners at Guantanamo can challenge the legality of their detention in U.S. courts.
"Today's decision forcefully repudiates the essential lawlessness of the Bush administration's failed Guantanamo policy," said Steven R. Shapiro, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The decision, delivered in the case Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that the mechanism that designates suspects as "enemy combatants" -- a status used to indefinitely imprison them as potential threats -- did not meet a sufficient standard to deprive them of habeas corpus.
Habeas corpus is a writ, or legal petition, that can be filed by or on behalf of a prisoner to challenge their detention before an independent judiciary. The legal action, also known as the "Great Writ", is a cornerstone of Western legal systems dating back to the English Magna Carta in 1215.
The administration argued that ample rights were provided by two ad-hoc laws passed by Congress in the face of earlier court challenges that solidified the "combatant status review tribunals" -- Pentagon reviews set up by order of then-Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz.
But the Pentagon, under the executive branch of government, cannot fulfill the spirit of habeas corpus and its concept of an independent judiciary in cases where the executive itself has taken the prisoners.
"Today's landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision has rightly reaffirmed the age-old fundamental right for those detained to receive a fair and neutral hearing and to learn the specific reason for their detention -- and challenge it," said Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA's executive director.
The ruling "signals the beginning of the end of an unjust military commissions process that permits the use of coerced evidence and denies other fundamental due process protections," said a statement today from Human Rights First, a New York-based lawyers group.
"The court has simply required what our Constitution demands: that the exercise of executive authority to deprive men of their liberty must be subject to meaningful federal judicial review," the statement continued.
Indeed, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the deciding vote in a 5 to 4 split ruling, wrote in the majority opinion, "[F]ew exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the executive to imprison a person."
Kennedy, a crucial swing vote in politically charged court decisions, voted alongside Justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David Souter.
The court's dissenters were its four conservatives -- Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.
Read the entire story here.
