The United States Supreme Court has delivered a historic judgment on President Bush's interpretation of his powers as a wartime leader by ruling that he cannot set up a criminal justice process at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp which violates US and international law.
The case, taken by one of the prisoners facing charges under special military commissions authorised by the president, will force the administration to bring the 450 prisoners to trial or release them. The judgment is a flat rejection of Mr Bush's approach to the "war on terror" and a welcome affirmation that the rule of law cannot be subverted by presidential decision.
Guantánamo has come to symbolise the legal, military and political values and attitudes of this administration. The camp was set up shortly after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Its inmates have been picked up by US military and their agents and allies in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and many other states and brought directly or indirectly to the camp in Cuba. In this way they were held extra-territorially and, it was assumed, outside the immediate purview of US and international law. Most of the current 460 prisoners have been held for more than four years. Only 10 have been charged under this special process, none put formally on trial. There is insufficient evidence for them to be held legally. Intelligence arguments have been used by the military against putting them on open trial. Many have been repeatedly beaten, shackled, sexually humiliated, deprived of sleep or otherwise tortured at the camp. They have been worse treated in other places before being sent there by "extraordinary rendition", the mendacious euphemism used by the administration to describe this illegal process.
That it is indeed illegal can now be more firmly stated by US and international opinion. The Supreme Court found the judicial process eventually put in train illegal on four counts. It violates the US military code. It transgresses US criminal law. It has inadequate congressional authority. And it breaches the Geneva Conventions, of which the US is itself a prominent signatory.
This is a devastating indictment of a misconceived and unacceptable exercise of US presidential executive authority. The legal consequences are likely to be far-reaching and long-lasting, both domestically and internationally. By affirming the primacy of domestic law over presidential wartime authority the court has restored the legal doctrine of the separation of powers to the centre of US constitutionalism. By affirming the binding effect of international law it has contradicted a central political thrust of the neoconservative executive nationalism that came to characterise the Bush administration's face towards the rest of the world.
President Bush is right to say a number of the Guantánamo inmates are dangerous men. This landmark judgment ensures that issue must be decided by due legal process, not arbitrary detention.