Litigation

Appeals Court Rejects Bagram Detainee Rights

By Peter Hardin

Three detainees held by the U.S. military at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan may not challenge their imprisonment through American courts, a federal appeals court ruled. The detainees have been held without trial for years.

At Guantanamo Bay, detainees have won the right to challenge their imprisonment through what are called habeas corpus hearings in U.S. courts. But Afghanistan is a war zone, and the United States effectively has sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay, the appeals court said, according to an Associated Press article.

“It is undisputed that Bagram, indeed the entire nation of Afghanistan, remains a theater of war,” said the opinion by the U.S. appeals court in Washington, D.C., a Los Angeles Times article reported.

The ruling represented “a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight,” the New York Times wrote.

Tina Foster, a lawyer for the detainees at Bagram, said that if the ruling survives, Obama and successor presidents would have a license to ?kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives? without a requirement to prove in a courtroom their suspicions of the detainees.

The ruling reversed a lower court decision that granted the three Bagram inmates a right to contest their detention with habeas corpus petitions.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay prison may challenge their detention in U.S. Courts. You can learn more from Gavel Grab about the Bagram case, or read about disputes involving detainees? rights and related proceedings in federal courts in these earlier Gavel Grab posts.

Full post as published by The Gavel on May 24, 2010 (boomark / email).