After the United States began holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in 2002, the George W. Bush administration argued that federal courts had no jurisdiction because the naval base was outside U.S. territory. Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights represented British detainees Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, and other prisoners held indefinitely without criminal charges or a judicial determination of their status. Lower courts rejected the challenge, but the Supreme Court agreed to hear it in November 2003.
On June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees could seek habeas corpus review in U.S. courts, rejecting the administration’s claim that the offshore location placed the detention system beyond judicial scrutiny. The decision enabled detainees to obtain counsel and triggered extensive legal challenges; the source states that hundreds of men were eventually released after court proceedings. Ratner later opposed Abu Ghraib abuse and, in 2007, sought criminal prosecution in France of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials. Historians and human-rights advocates later disputed whether this litigation constrained or inadvertently legitimized the broader war-on-terror system.
