Lawyers Committee Applauds Supreme Court Decision To Review Hamdi Detention

NEW YORK— The U.S. Supreme Court decided today to hear the appeal of Yaser Hamdi, a U.S. citizen who has been detained without charge for 20 months in military prisons in Virginia and South Carolina. According to the Department of Defense, Mr. Hamdi was “affiliated with a Taliban unit” in Afghanistan, where he surrendered to the Northern Alliance in the fall of 2001.

"The Supreme Court appears poised to issue the most important set of decisions about the scope of presidential power since World War II," said Deborah Pearlstein, Director of the Lawyers Committee’s U.S. Law and Security Program. "With today's decision granting Hamdi's case, the Supreme Court has sent a clear message that the President's power to detain U.S. citizens is subject to important limits."

Former U.S. prisoners of war, including Ambassador Douglas “Pete” Peterson, submitted a “friend of the court” brief in the case, urging the Supreme Court to hear Mr. Hamdi’s appeal. The brief - filed jointly by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School - argues that the United States is holding Mr. Hamdi in violation of its obligations under the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

“In accepting this case, the Supreme Court is asserting its essential role as an independent check on Executive power,” added Pearlstein.

At issue in the appeal is a sweeping decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which ruled that the President can hold any U.S. citizen captured near a foreign battlefield in indefinite, incommunicado detention, with no opportunity to assert his innocence. Among other things, the Fourth Circuit 's decision disregarded the requirements of the Geneva Conventions - and the U.S. military’s own binding regulations - which provide that a captured combatant must be treated as a prisoner of war unless and until a competent tribunal determines him ineligible for such treatment. No such tribunal has been convened in Mr. Hamdi’s case.

In addition to Ambassador Peterson, the signatories on the brief include Leslie Jackson, Edward Jackfert, Paul Reuter, and Neal Harrington—all former prisoners of war whose lives were deeply affected by their captor’s compliance, or failure to comply, with the Geneva Conventions. Also signing the brief are experts in the laws of war, including former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, former federal appeals court judge Patricia Wald, as well as Payam Akhavan, Mary Cheh, Stephen Salzburg, Marco Sassoli, and Minna Schrag. The law firm of Wiggin & Dana served as counsel on the brief.