Michael Ratner, a fearless civil liberties lawyer who successfully challenged the US government’s detention of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay without judicial review, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 72.
The cause was complications of cancer, said his brother, Bruce, a developer and an owner of the Brooklyn Nets. As head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Mr Ratner oversaw litigation that, in effect, voided New York City’s wholesale stop-and-frisk policing tactic.
The centre also accused the federal government of complicity in the kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects and argued against the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency, the waging of war in Iraq without the consent of Congress, the encouragement of right-wing rebels in Nicaragua and the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war.
“Under his leadership, the centre grew from a small but scrappy civil rights organisation into one of the leading human rights organisations in the world,” David Cole, a former colleague at the centre and a professor at Georgetown Law School, said in an interview this week.
“He sued some of the most powerful people in the world on behalf of some of the least powerful.”
He defied legal odds and even occasional death threats to defend lost causes, gambling that even a verdict against his clients could galvanise public opinion in his favour.
“He was part of a generation of lawyers that was absolutely bold and that understood the political aspects of law,” his former wife, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a civil rights lawyer, said this week, “and that was not afraid of bringing a lawsuit that was going to lose if it was going to support the community.”
Mr Cole predicted that Mr Ratner would be best remembered for filing the first lawsuit on behalf of Guantánamo detainees in a case that eventually affirmed their right to judicial review.
"This was a case that was regarding a fundamental principle, going back to the Magna Carta in 1215, about the right to have some kind of a hearing before you get tossed in jail," Mr Ratner told Mother Jones magazine in 2005.
In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that prisoners at Guantánamo, where the court said the US government exercised de facto sovereignty, had a constitutional right to habeas corpus, which they had been denied under the Military Commissions Act.
Mr Cole said Mr Ratner’s tenacious advocacy not only gave the detainees the right to their day in court, but also culminated in “the first Supreme Court decision in history to rule against a president in wartime regarding his treatment of enemy fighters”.
While Guantánamo still has not been closed, as president Barack Obama had promised, hundreds of detainees have been released. “When I asked him, several years later, what he thought his chances were in filing that suit,” Mr Cole recalled, “he answered: ‘None whatsoever. We filed 100 per cent on principle.’ That could be his epitaph.”
New York Times