The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia vacated a conviction of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the now-famous driver for Osama Bin Laden, who was the named applicant in the case decided by the Supreme Court a few years ago. The Court here vacated the conviction of the military commission in Guantanamo Bay on the grounds that the conviction was for a crime that does not exist in the laws of war. A summary of the decision is on the ASIL website here.Related to our discussion of the Al-Sekini case, last week several Royal Marines of the British forces in Afghanistan were charged with murder, for killings in an incident in Afghanistan in 2011.
Further to our discussion of extradition, the High Court of England and Wales dismissed the last attempts by five alleged terrorists in the U.K. to resist extradition to the United States, a summary of which can be found here. The claimants argued that there was a double standard, as the Home Secretary last week blocked the extradition to the United States of the young man with Asperger's syndrom, who had hacked into Pentagon computer systems, in a case that someone raised in class last week.
In the third presidential debate Mr. Romney suggested that President of Ahmadinejad of Iran should be indicted under the Genocide Convention for inciting genocide. This immediately led to discussion on social media about what he could possibly have meant - whether he was suggesting that Ahmadinejad be indicted by the International Criminal Court (which the Republican Party in particular is hostile to), or if he thought that somehow Ahmadinejad could be indicted within the U.S., and if so how. That debate has not made its way on to Opinio Juris, here and here. They don't really deal with the immunity issues.
Finally, in the area of use of force, there was a story this week about a cyber-attack on a Saudi firm, raising fears that Iran is responding to alleged U.S. and Israeli cyber-attacks on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. The international law world is struggling with questions of whether and under what circumstances such "attacks" might constitute armed attacks justifying a use of military force in response in the exercise of self-defence. And just today, Sudan accused Israel of conducting an air attack on an ammunition facility in Sudan, in which two persons were killed.
I read with interest that the D.C. Circuit had vacated the military tribunal conviction of Salim Ahmed Hamdan. The United States' reliance on military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay flies in the face of many of the legal principles on which our country's justice system was built. Holding trials in which a defendant does not have the right to an attorney, may not view the evidence submitted against him or confront his accusers, and may be charged with violating ex post facto laws is unacceptable.
ReplyDeleteThe United States implemented the use of military tribunals as part of its global war on terror for the simple reason that it would otherwise be too difficullt to convict suspected terrorists using traditional systems of justice, rules of evidence, and standards of proof. While there are many legitimate obstacles facing U.S. authorities who wish to prosecute foreign nationals suspected of perpetrating acts of terror or supporting terrorist groups, this is no excuse to curtail the traditional protections offered to criminal defendants.
Reading this story brought to mind a New York Times Op-Ed piece written earlier this year by Lakhdar Boumediene - another former Guantanmo detainee with a Supreme Court case bearing his name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/my-guantanamo-nightmare.html
In his Op-Ed, Boumediene quoted the Supreme Court's decision in his case, which stated that because “the consequence of error may be detention of persons for the duration of hostilities that may last a generation or more, this is a risk too significant to ignore.”