LOS ANGELES/WASHINGTON, 10 July — The most significant legal challenge yet to the detention of more than 500 prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay will be launched today by a group of civil rights lawyers, professors and clergymen which believes the US is violating the American Constitution.
The group — which includes several prominent legal scholars and a former US attorney general — will set its case before a panel of federal judges in Los Angeles, arguing that the US government has no right to declare the prisoners off-limits to civilian courts and that the failure to even disclose their names is “repugnant to democracy”.
“This case presents a question of singular and profound importance,” the lawyers argue in documents placed with the court. “May the United States government violate its own laws and in no court be held accountable? In holding these individuals indefinitely, without any hearing or any form of due process, the government is violating both the United States Constitution and international law.”
The US government is currently holding 564 alleged Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters at the US naval base of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where a semi-permanent facility — Camp Delta — has been built to house the inmates.
Despite a barrage of international criticism, the US refuses to recognize the inmates as prisoners of war or grant them the rights enshrined in the Geneva Conventions.
Though they are being regularly interrogated by US officials, none of the prisoners have access to lawyers. “We are interrogating the men to extract as much information as possible that might be useful to battlefield troops in southwest Asia or else in the global war against terror,” said Lt. Col. Dennis Finks, a spokesman for the interrogation team. “There is no time-line.”
The case being brought today was previously rejected by a lower court on the grounds that Guantanamo Bay was technically outside the United States and therefore beyond the court’s jurisdiction and that the petitioners had no right to bring an action on the prisoners’ behalf.
The lawyers have argued that ruling was “an apologia and a washing of hands for arbitrary, capricious and unlawful action”. Not only is Guantanamo Bay a US-run military base, the brief argues, but the men whose decisions are being challenged — including President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — are answerable to the US courts.
The lawyer leading the challenge, Stephen Yagman, said he wanted the prisoners to be identified, told why they were being detained and given the chance to speak before a civilian court if they chose.
“We’re asking for nothing radical, nothing that anyone could be offended by,” he told The Independent.
“This is truly Orwellian, a circular absurdity. I don’t know where this is headed but eventually something is going to have to happen.”
It is almost exactly six months since the first group of prisoners were flown to Guantanamo Bay from Afghanistan. (The Independent)
