The United States occupies the Base, which comprises 45 square miles of land and water along the southeast coast of Cuba, pursuant to a 1903 Lease Agreement executed with the newly independent Republic of Cuba in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. The issue before the Court was whether the Judiciary could exercise jurisdiction over the claims of German prisoners held in the Landsberg prison in Germany following the cessation of hostilities in Europe. . Id., at 209 (opinion of Rutledge, J. Columbia lacked jurisdiction to entertain the habeas claims of courts or other tribunals. 1989) (hereinafter Sharpe). Media. control over the Guantanamo Base, and may continue to do so (1) The Court rejects respondents’ primary submission that these cases are controlled by Eisentrager’s holding that a District Court lacked authority to grant habeas relief to German citizens captured by U. S. forces in China, tried and convicted of war crimes by an American military commission headquartered in Nanking, and incarcerated in occupied Germany. which it held that the District Court for the District of

The facts here are distinguishable from those in Eisentrager in two critical ways, leading to the conclusion that a federal court may entertain the petitions.

426. GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, et al. occupies under a lease and treaty recognizing Cuba’s For these reasons, I concur in the judgment of the Court. Odah et al. In 1948, just two months after the Eisentrager petitioners filed their petition for habeas corpus in the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia, this Court issued its decision in Ahrens v. Clark, 335 U. S. 188, a case concerning the application of the habeas statute to the petitions of 120 Germans who were then being detained at Ellis Island, New York, for deportation to Germany.

0000004257 00000 n B., at 265 (internal quotation marks omitted).

countries at war with the United States, and they deny that Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Naval Base, which the United States These petitioners have since been released from custody. Eisentrager, held that the District Court correctly The ratio decidendi of Braden does not call into question the principle of Ahrens applied in Eisentrager: that habeas challenge to present physical confinement must be made in the district where the physical confinement exists. ).7, When the District Court for the District of Columbia reviewed the German prisoners’ habeas application in Eisentrager, it thus dismissed their action on the authority of Ahrens. The brevity of the Court’s statutory analysis signifies nothing more than that the Court considered it obvious (as indeed it is) that, unaided by the canon of constitutional avoidance, the statute did not confer jurisdiction over an alien detained outside the territorial jurisdiction of the courts of the United States. Habeas jurisdiction nevertheless extended to those regions on the theory that the delegation of the King’s authority did not include his own prerogative writs. There, the question was whether “the Court of Queen’s Bench can be debarred from making an order in favour of a British citizen unlawfully or arbitrarily detained” in Northern Rhodesia, which was at the time a protectorate of the Crown. J.) authorizing the use of necessary and appropriate force against 03–343 v. UNITED STATES et al. See id., at 300, 302 (Lord Evershed, M. R.); id., at 305 (Romer, L. And indeed, §1350 explicitly confers the privilege of The reality is this: Today’s opinion, and today’s opinion alone, overrules Eisentrager; today’s opinion, and today’s opinion alone, extends the habeas statute, for the first time, to aliens held beyond the sovereign territory of the United States and beyond the territorial jurisdiction of its courts. Narcotics Agents, 403 U. S. 388 (1971), which would allow prisoners to sue their captors for damages. cursory treatment is explained by the Court’s then-recent A.) And indeed, §1350 explicitly confers the privilege of We found that jurisdiction existed in Kentucky for Braden’s petition challenging the Kentucky detainer, notwithstanding his physical confinement in Alabama. Id., at 778. at 777. Braden, 410 U. S., at 495. Cf. III, 48 Stat. six of the noted critical facts were relevant only to the Endorsement of that proposition is repeated in Part IV. (concluding that the writ would run to such a territory); id., at 618 (Farwell, L.

If you have a disability and are having trouble accessing information on this website or need materials in an alternate format contact [email protected] for assistance. The case originally concerned four British and Australian citizens, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Mamdouh Habib, and David Hicks, who had been seized in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001–02 and eventually turned over to U.S. authorities. As it has evolved over the past two centuries, the habeas statute clearly has expanded habeas corpus “beyond the limits that obtained during the 17th and 18th centuries.” Swain v. Pressley, 430 U. S. 372, 380, n. 13 (1977). of Oral Arg. oners contend that they are being held in federal custody in

1813) (Story, J., on circuit) (ordering the release of Portuguese sailors arrested for deserting their ship); Wilson v. Izard, 30 F. Cas. In Eisentrager, though the Court’s holding focused on §2241, its analysis spoke more broadly: “We have pointed out that the privilege of litigation has been extended to aliens, whether friendly or enemy, only because permitting their presence in the country implied protection. Rasul v. Bush, case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 28, 2004, that U.S. courts have jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions filed on behalf of foreign nationals imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because the … Boumediene v. Bush, case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on June 12, 2008, held that the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006, which barred foreign nationals held by the United States as “enemy combatants” from challenging their detentions in U.S. federal courts, was an unconstitutional
Wearing my academic hat, I have written two books: What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity (Yale 2013), and Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (Simon & Schuster 2006). x��ZM�$� ����s�%�-`��tOO �8��� �1����穊�*QU�5�>x��)�$�|���)��+�#���9]?�p�n"���@E�JZ�������.�ooQ���u{����9>b*�6�e�覂}�o�^>��������W�?\��qa��-�|{��y�N�R����. challenges under 28 U.S. C. §2241, which authorizes Aliens held at the base, like American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal courts’ §2241 authority. being held in military custody is immaterial. But as I have explained, see supra, at 17–18, Mwenya dealt with a British subject and the court went out of its way to explain that its expansive description of the scope of the writ was premised on that fact. As Lord Justice Sellers explained: “Lord Mansfield gave the writ the greatest breadth of application which in the then circumstances could well be conceived… . Rasul v. Bush. By spurious reliance on Braden the Court evades explaining why stare decisis can be disregarded, and why Eisentrager was wrong. That case is Eisentrager, but to fully understand its implications for the present dispute, I must also discuss our decisions in the earlier case of Ahrens v. Clark, 335 U. S. 188 (1948), and the later case of Braden. . 6   The Court grasps at two other bases for jurisdiction: the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), 28 U. S. C. §1350, and the federal-question statute, 28 U. S. C. §1331. 29, 77, 108.5. aliens. Ahrens explicitly reserved “the question of what process, if any, a person confined in an area not subject to the jurisdiction of any district court may employ to assert federal rights.” Id., at 192, n. 4. Court has jurisdiction to hear petitioners’ habeas To do so neatly and cleanly, it must either argue that our decision in Braden overruled Eisentrager, or admit that it is overruling Eisentrager. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. And indeed, 28 U. S. C. §1350 explicitly confers the privilege of suing for an actionable “tort … committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States” on aliens alone. of Oral Arg. In fact, what Braden said is that “[w]here American citizens confined overseas (and thus outside the territory of any district court) have sought relief in habeas corpus, we have held, if only implicitly, that the petitioners’ absence from the district does not present a jurisdictional obstacle to consideration of the claim.” 410 U. S., at 498 (emphasis added). The Eisentrager Court mentioned those circumstances, however, only in the course of its constitutional analysis, and not in its application of the statute. Justice Scalia exposes the weakness in the Court’s conclusion that Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court of Ky., 410 U. S. 484 (1973), “overruled the statutory predicate to Eisentrager’s holding,” ante, at 10–11. 0000031142 00000 n That presumption has no application to the Rasul v. Bush, case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 28, 2004, that U.S. courts have jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions filed on behalf of foreign nationals imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because the base, which the United States has held under lease from Cuba since 1899, was effectively within U.S. territory. 1   See Tr. Scalia, J., filed a 306, pp. The Commander in Chief and his subordinates had every reason to expect that the internment of combatants at Guantanamo Bay would not have the consequence of bringing the cumbersome machinery of our domestic courts into military affairs. By the express terms of its agreements with Cuba, the United States exercises “complete jurisdiction and control” over the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and may continue to exercise such control permanently if it so chooses.

cf. Fortunately, however, the Court’s irrelevant discussion also happens to be wrong. The Court of Appeals instead held that petitioners had a constitutional right to habeas corpus secured by the Suspension Clause, U. S. Petitioners in these cases differ from the Eisentrager detainees in important respects: They are not nationals of countries at war with the United States, and they deny that they have engaged in or plotted acts of aggression against the United States; they have never been afforded access to any tribunal, much less charged with and convicted of wrongdoing; and for more than two years they have been imprisoned in territory over which the United States exercises exclusive jurisdiction and control. 2 (1866). Petitioners here differ from the Eisentrager The question now before us is whether the habeas statute confers a right to judicial review of the legality of Executive detention of aliens in a territory over which the United States exercises plenary and exclusive jurisdiction, but not “ultimate sovereignty.”6. See also King v. The Earl of Crewe ex parte Sekgome, [1910] 2 K. B.