US:HUNDREDS OF people held at Guantánamo Bay have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in civilian courts, the United States supreme court ruled yesterday.
In a major setback to the Bush administration's conduct of the "war on terror", the court ruled by a 5-4 majority that Congress had not validly taken away habeas corpus rights from the detainees, many of whom have been held without charge for over six years.
"The laws and constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. "Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law."
The court has ruled twice before that the detainees have a statutory right to contest their indefinite detention before an independent judge, but each time, Congress passed new laws to bar access to the courts. Yesterday's ruling asserts the detainees' constitutional right to habeas corpus, rejecting the administration's claim that detainees had no constitutional rights because Guantánamo is in Cuba, not inside the US.
"The nation's basic charter cannot be contracted away like this," Mr Kennedy wrote.
"The constitution grants Congress and the president the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say 'what the law is'."
Mr Kennedy said federal judges could ultimately order some of the 270 detainees to be released, but that such orders would depend on security concerns and other circumstances.
In his dissenting opinion, Antonin Scalia said the ruling would hamper the US in its struggle with radical Islamists.
"It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," he said.
President George Bush told reporters in Rome that he was unhappy with the ruling.
"We'll abide by the court's decision. That doesn't mean I have to agree with it," he said. "It was a deeply divided court, and I strongly agree with those who dissented." The court said that the system the Bush administration has put in place to classify detainees as enemy combatants and to review their status is inadequate and is no substitute for habeas corpus.
Dissenting, chief justice John Roberts criticised his colleagues for striking down what he called "the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants". But in a separate opinion for the majority, David Souter pointed out that many of the detainees had been held for years without being able to challenge their imprisonment.
"A second fact insufficiently appreciated by the dissenters is the length of the disputed imprisonments, some of the prisoners represented here today having been locked up for six years," he said. "Hence the hollow ring when the dissenters suggest that the court is somehow precipitating the judiciary into reviewing claims that the military . . . could handle within some reasonable period of time."