Washington, USA - A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to immediately release 17 Chinese Muslims and allow them to stay in the United States, ruling that they are no longer considered enemy combatants.
Federal District Judge Urbina called the detention of the 17 prisoners — ethnic Uighers, a restive Muslim minority in western China — unlawful, saying the Constitution prohibits indefinite imprisonment without charges.
Efforts to find a home for the detainees has been complicated by fears in many countries of diplomatic reprisals by China. In June, federal appeals judges issued a decision that ridiculed as inadequate the Pentagon’s secret evidence for holding one Uighur, Huzaifa Parhat, a former fruit peddler who said he had gone to Afghanistan to escape China.
Since then, the Pentagon has conceded that it would “serve no useful purpose” to continue to try to prove that any of the 17 Uighurs were ever enemy combatants.
The Uighurs say they have never been enemies of the United States, though in 2002 they were in Afghanistan, where they were detained. They say they would be persecuted or killed if they were returned to China. The Bush administration has said it has failed to find another country willing to accept them.
The government argued that the 17 detainees should be held at Guantánamo until another country could be found to accept them. In filings, the Justice Department lawyers argued that while Judge Urbina could hear the Uighurs’ case, he could not order their release because the judiciary “simply has no authority” to do so.
The Justice Department said the government’s executive branch, not the judicial branch, has the authority to conclude military detentions, as it has in prior wars. It noted that in World War II “no court ever questioned that it was solely for the political branches — not the courts” to decide how Italian prisoners of war were handled.
P. Sabin Willett, one of the Uighurs’ lawyers, said such claims appeared to be laying the groundwork for government appeals.
When the Supreme Court ruled in June that detainees at Guantánamo had the right to challenge their detention in federal court, the justices said that after more than six years of legal wrangling the prisoners should have their cases heard quickly, because “the costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody.”
Until now, none of the scores of cases brought by detainees have been resolved by any judge.
Since the Supreme Court issued its ruling, lawyers for most of the 255 detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have pressed ahead with habeas corpus lawsuits, yet most of those cases have been delayed by battles over issues like whether some court sessions will be held in secret, whether detainees can attend and what level of proof will justify detention.
Some of the arguments made by the Justice Department appear to challenge the Supreme Court’s conclusion that the federal courts have a role in deciding the fate of the detainees. Officials and lawyers inside and outside of the government say the new legal confrontation suggests that the Bush administration will most likely continue its defense of the detention camp until the end of President Bush’s term and that it is not likely to close the camp, as administration officials have said they would like to do.
“The legal issues that are being raised by the administration are going to take longer than the remaining time of the administration” to resolve, said Vijay Padmanabhan, an assistant professor at Cardozo Law School who was until July a State Department lawyer with responsibility for detainee issues.
“It is part of a broader strategy,” Mr. Padmanabhan added, “which is not to make difficult decisions about Guantánamo and leave it to the next president.”
Detainees’ advocates say that the administration is using the legal battle to delay judicial review of its evidence, while government lawyers argue that the cases are moving rapidly considering that they are unprecedented.
A Justice Department spokesman, Erik Ablin, said the government was working toward quick hearings for detainees, but was determined to take every precaution to avoid having dangerous people released. He added that “it is certainly the government’s goal to detain enemy combatants who are deemed a threat to the United States.”
Habeas corpus suits, which have their root in centuries-old English law, are generally streamlined proceedings for prisoners to force officials to explain why they are being held. The Guantánamo cases permitted by the Supreme Court’s ruling, Boumediene v. Bush, are to allow courts to review the government’s reasons for holding the men as enemy combatants.
The military’s enemy combatant hearings, which the administration says permit indefinite detention, are separate from the Pentagon’s effort to prosecute some detainees in military commission trials.