Little redress in US courts for detainees

The Supreme Court avoided a test of Bush's terror-fighting powers Monday, letting stand a ruling denying Guantánamo detainees access.

By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 3, 2007 edition

Page 1 of 4

WASHINGTON - A sharply divided US Supreme Court has declined to take up one of the thorniest legal issues in the Bush administration's war on terror – whether detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to federal court hearings to challenge their open-ended detention.

Instead, in a significant victory for the White House, the nation's highest court on Monday let stand a Feb. 20 appeals court ruling that the detainees are not entitled to immediate access to US federal courts.

Lawyers representing 45 of the 385 detainees at the terror detention camp at the US Naval base at Guantanamo had asked the justices to take up the case on an expedited basis. They wanted the high court to hear arguments during a special oral argument session in early May so a decision could be released by the term's end in late June.

But the court refused to wade into the controversy at all. Instead, the detainees must now exhaust the legal and other avenues established by Congress and the military at a federal appeals court in Washington before bringing their cases to the nation's highest court.

Four of nine justices must vote to take up a case. In issuing the denial on Monday, three justices, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, saying the court should have taken up the cases.

The decision means that detainee review procedures and military commission trials will move forward this spring without the threat of an adverse Supreme Court ruling hanging over military prosecutors and other Defense Department officials.

But two justices, John Paul Stevens and Anthony Kennedy, issued what appeared to be a warning to the Bush administration. They said legal analysts should not see the high court's refusal to take up the case as an endorsement of the government's treatment of the detainees. They said that Guantánamo detainees could file future appeals to the Supreme Court if their cases were subject to unreasonable delays.

"Alternative means exist for us to consider our jurisdiction" in the cases, Justice Stevens writes in a brief statement.

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next Page