On The Front Lines
Rutherford Joins with Diverse Coalition to Call on Supreme Court to Declare MCA Unconstitutional, Affirm Habeas Corpus Rights for Detainees
WASHINGTON - In anticipation of today's oral arguments in two companion cases brought by detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay to challenge their detention in American courts, The Rutherford Institute, in cooperation with a coalition of public interest and religious groups with widely-ranging ideological views, filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court.
The cases, Boumediene v. Bush and al Odah v. U.S. , test whether the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006 validly strips federal courts of jurisdiction over pending habeas corpus petitions filed by foreign citizen detainees held at Guantanamo. The cases are on appeal from a 2-1 decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued on February 20, 2007. A copy of the coalition's brief is available here.
"Americans have long adhered to the notion that a person is innocent until proven guilty. However, we cannot pick and choose when or to whom that principle should be applied," said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. "When we deny habeas corpus to the Guantanamo detainees, we risk more than just locking up individuals who might be innocent. We risk undermining the fundamental democratic principles that hold our government and its leaders in check."
The Bush Administration has strongly opposed permitting habeas corpus suits by foreigners held as enemy combatants outside the United States. At the administration's urging, Congress in 2006 passed the MCA, a key feature of which was to strip federal courts of the ability to hear habeas cases filed by Guantanamo detainees. Boumediene v. Bush centers on Lakhdar Boumediene, who was labeled an "alien unlawful enemy combatant" by President Bush and has been detained at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, along with several hundred other prisoners. Denied any habeas corpus rights, Boumediene has been imprisoned for the past five years without access to a court or meaningful communication with the outside world, including his family. In filing a brief in support of granting detainees access to civilian courts, the coalition of organizations that included The Rutherford Institute, along with the Constitution Project, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First, argued that habeas corpus ensures separation of powers by providing an irreducible check by an independent judiciary against unlawful executive detention. As the coalition attorneys stated, the Constitution's habeas provision "ensures that neither Congress nor the Executive can create 'law-free' zones within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States where the Judiciary cannot independently inquire into the legality of Executive detention . . . Such Kafkaesque regimes may lawfully exist in other countries where executive power is absolute. But the Framers of our Constitution expressly ensured that habeas corpus would be available to permit the Judiciary to check absolute Executive power."
