Guantanamo detainees take fight to Supreme Court
Tags:
Condemned by the lower house of the US Congress to remain in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely, "War On Terror" detainees are taking their cases to the Supreme Court, hoping it can break them out.
The House of Representatives last week approved a bill that would prevent any detainees held in the US naval base in Cuba from being transferred to the United States for detention or trial.
But eight cases are pending in the highest US court, representing nearly all of the prison's more than 170 detainees and reflecting their diverse legal predicaments, with final rulings expected in 2011.
US President Barack Obama vowed to shut down the controversial military prison during his 2008 White House run and issued an executive order shortly after assuming office to close it by January 2010.
But Mr Obama has missed his own deadline as the administration has run into knotty legal issues, difficulties in finding countries to accept detainees and congressional opposition to trying them in US courts.
The prison currently holds 174 detainees captured after the September 11 attacks, including three who have been convicted and 58 who have been placed in indefinite detention without trial.
Scores of other inmates have been transferred to third countries, where they have been released.
The Supreme Court dealt successive blows to then-president George W. Bush's Guantanamo policies in 2004, 2006 and 2008, ruling in previous cases that detainees had the right to contest their detention in US courts and hear the evidence against them.
"Within the Constitution's separation-of-powers structure, few 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," the court ruled in a 5-4 decision in June 2008.
Both the Mr Bush and Mr Obama administrations "have steadily and energetically sought to keep for the executive branch most of the control over US detention policy in the 'war on terrorism,' even as they were living under a constitutional regime imposed on them by the Supreme Court," court expert Lyle Denniston wrote recently on the Scotusblog website.
Federal judges have already reviewed 57 cases and found detention to be unjustified in all but one third of them.
But appeals courts have sided with the Mr Obama administration and steadily reversed those rulings — 14 to date — as well as prohibiting any detainees from being released on US soil.
Post new comment