Guantanamo inmates in new legal fight
 Published: Monday March 23, 2009 |
Lawyers have filed two court challenges against the Obama administration's treatment of Guantanamo detainees and its future plans for the men, most of whom have been held for years without trial.
One motion obtained by AFP on Monday was filed on behalf of Chinese Uighur, Huzaifat Parhat. He was among 17 Uighur ordered released by a US court in June seven years after their arrest, but who remain in detention at the remote US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, southern Cuba.
The lawyers filed a motion of contempt against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates denouncing his "continued refusal to comply with a final order" by a Washington appeals court to release Parhat, the document said.
The lawyers also demanded that a new court ruling should include "a threat of sanctions" in order to ensure Gates complies with the order to release Parhat.
The other lawsuit filed by about 15 inmates takes issue with new rules laid down by the administration of US President Barack Obama earlier this month justifying the state's right to hold terror suspects.
On March 13, the Justice Department said it was dropping the "enemy combatant" designation for terror suspects and vowed to apply international law to its detention policies. It said only those who "substantially supported" the Al-Qaeda network, Taliban Islamic militants or "associated forces" would be held under such laws.
But the detainees' lawyers downplayed the new policy as only a "partial retreat" from the positions held under the previous administration of former president George W. Bush.
"The conceptual approach they now advance has not greatly changed," they argued in the court filing.
They also lashed out at the government for justifying detaining suspects without charge or trial solely on the basis of a congressional decision authorizing the US-led "war on terror" after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The political decision to hold suspects indefinitely without charge because they are deemed too dangerous to be free is a policy choice that under the US Constitution "must be resolved by Congress, not by the executive branch," they wrote.
On Friday, lawyers for 30 detainees filed a motion accusing the Obama administration of violating the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of the estimated 240 prisoners remaining at the controversial prison camp.
Obama has vowed to close the camp within the next 12 months, and has ordered individual reviews of the cases against each of the remaining prisoners.
