Lawyers representing nine prisoners at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, filed lawsuits in federal court on Friday arguing their detention was unlawful and unconstitutional and seeking their release.
Five cases covering nine prisoners were filed in US District Court in Washington four days after the US Supreme Court dealt a defeat to the Bush administration and ruled foreign terrorism suspects held at the base could use the US judicial system to challenge their confinement.
The lawsuits seek the release of British citizens Moazzem Begg and Feroz Abbasi, Turkish citizen Murat Kurnaz, French citizens Mourad Benchallali, Nizar Sassi and Ridouane Khalid, Jordanian Jamil El-Banna, Iraqi Bisher Al-Rawi and Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was 15 at the time he was seized in Afghanistan and is now 17.
Without charges
The cases contend their confinement lacks any legal basis. They were filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based legal activist group representing 53 Guantanamo prisoners, and a group of affiliated lawyers.
The US holds at Guantanamo about 595 non-US citizens detained in what US President George W. Bush calls the global war on terrorism, most of them captured in Afghanistan. The US began imprisoning those suspects at the base in January 2002.
Nearly all have been held without charges or access to lawyers. Human rights groups have been among those condemning the base as "a legal black hole" and have accused the Pentagon of interrogations that amount to torture.
The lawyers asked the court to declare that "the prolonged, indefinite and restrictive detention" of the prisoners at the base is "arbitrary and unlawful," and represented deprivation of liberty without due process in violation of the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment.
Cease interrogations
The cases also contend that Bush's November, 2001 order authorizing trials of foreign terrorism suspects before special US military tribunals was unconstitutional and violated military law and international treaties.
The suits requested that the government to allow defense lawyers to meet and confer with the nine prisoners "in private and unmonitored attorney-client conversations," and to cease all interrogations of the prisoners while the case is pending.
No pentagon comment
"The Supreme Court repudiated the position of the government that they could hold people outside the rule of law. What these cases now do is apply the rule of law to the detentions in Guantanamo," said Jeffrey Fogel, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
A Pentagon spokesman, Major Michael Shavers, declined comment on the content of the lawsuits "because it's pending litigation." Shavers also said the Bush administration had not decided what actions it would take in response to the Supreme Court ruling.
"Obviously, we're going to comply with the court ruling, but there's been no decision made yet as to how we're going to do that," Shavers said.
The Center for Constitutional Rights on Thursday demanded in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld access to its clients at Guantanamo and offered to organize lawyers to provide legal counsel to other detainees.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RELATIONS: Cultural spats, such as China’s claims over the origins of kimchi, have soured public opinion in South Korea against Beijing over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday met South Korean counterpart Lee Jae-myung, after taking center stage at an Asian summit in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s departure. The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came the final day of Xi’s first trip to South Korea in more than a decade, and a day after his meeting with the Canadian prime minister that was a reset of the nations’ damaged ties. Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home on Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two
RSS