Terrorism suspects held in Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional right to pursue lawsuits challenging their imprisonment, a US federal judge ruled last night.
The prisoners at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have the constitutional right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law, US District Judge Joyce Hens Green said.
The ruling is a defeat for the Bush administration as it struck down how the US military reviewed their cases.
The judge ruled ruled that the special military tribunals to determine the status of each Guantanamo detainee as an "enemy combatant" violated the constitutional protection of a fair hearing. Such a designation allows the government to hold the suspects indefinitely.
Judge Green said the procedures failed to give the detainees access to material evidence and failed to let lawyers help them when the government refused to disclose classified information.
In addition to those constitutional defects applying to all the cases, Judge Green also cited problems with the tribunals relying on statements possibly obtained by torture or coercion, and by using a vague and overly broad definition of enemy combatant.
More than 540 al-Qaeda suspects and accused Taliban fighters are being held at Guantanamo after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and operations in the US "war on terror".
The ruling involved about 50 detainees. The judge rejected the Bush administration's argument that the prisoners have no constitutional rights and their lawsuits challenging the conditions of their confinement and seeking their release must be dismissed in their entirety.
The Department of Justice will be looking at what the appropriate next steps are to take in this matter," White House spokesman Mr Scott McClellan said.
He noted that another federal judge recently came to the opposite conclusion and said the Justice Department would move "expeditiously" in "resolving the issues" before the US court of appeals.
The tribunals, formally called a military commission, at the base were authorised by President George W. Bush after the September 11th, 2001, hijacked airliner attacks on the United States, but have been criticized by human rights groups as unfair.