Lawsuit Challenges Trump’s “Cruel, Unnecessary and Illegal” Transfers of Migrants to Guantánamo
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In a lawsuit submitted to the District Court in Washington, D.C. on Saturday (March 1), the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) asked the Court to urgently intervene to “put a stop” to what they accurately describe as the Trump administration’s “cruel, unnecessary, and illegal transfers” of migrants to the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As the groups explained in a press release, transferring migrants to Guantánamo from the US mainland is a policy “without any legal authority, in violation of federal law and the US Constitution.”
The central premise of the lawsuit is that, although foreign nationals have been held at Guantánamo before — in a Migrant Operations Center established in the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea, and, most notoriously, in the “war on terror” prison established in January 2002, where 15 men are still held in various states of fundamental lawlessness — the foreign nationals being sent to Guantánamo by Donald Trump have legal and constitutional rights that cannot be wished away through the traditional subterfuge of pretending that US law doesn’t apply at Guantánamo because, technically, it is only leased from the Cuban government, which has ultimate sovereignty.
In relation to the Migrant Operations Center and the “war on terror” prison, this subterfuge has, shamefully, been largely successful, but, as the rights groups argue compellingly in their lawsuit, because the current migrants have been previously held on the US mainland, even though their asylum claims were ultimately unsuccessful, and they have all been subjected to “final removal” orders, they are still protected by the US Constitution, and by US law; specifically, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ Ground-Breaking Decision in the Case of Former Guantánamo Prisoner Djamel Ameziane
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I’ve had a busy few weeks, and haven’t been able, until now, to address a recent and important decision taken by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in the case of Djamel Ameziane, an ethnic Berber from Algeria who was imprisoned at Guantánamo for nearly 12 years, from February 2002 to December 2013, after an initial two month’s imprisonment at Kandahar air base in Afghanistan. The IACHR is a key part of the Organization of American States (OAS), whose mission is “to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere,” and whose resolutions are supposed to be binding on the US, which is a member state.
As his lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) explained in a press release on May 28, the IACHR’s decision (available here) determined that the United States was “responsible for Mr. Ameziane’s torture, abuse, and decade-long confinement without charge,” and issued a series of recommendations — namely, that “the United States should provide ‘adequate material and moral reparations’ for the human rights violations suffered by Mr. Ameziane for his 12 years of confinement.”
As CCR added, “Some of these measures include the continuance of criminal investigations for the torture of Mr. Ameziane at Kandahar Airbase and Guantánamo Bay detention center; compensation for his years spent in arbitrary detention to address any lasting physical and psychological effects; medical and psychological care for his rehabilitation; and the issuance of a public apology by the United States president or any other high-ranking official to establish Mr. Ameziane’s innocence.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
