WASHINGTON, April 19 (IslamOnline.net) – The U.S. Supreme Court is to rule on the detention of more than 600 people held in the American military base of Guantanamo Tuesday, April 20.

Detainees at Guantánamo, some of whom have been held for more than two years, are seeking an opportunity to challenge their detention.

But the Bush administration insists, however, that they can be imprisoned indefinitely.

The Supreme Court should rule for the detainees, The New York Times reported Monday, April 19.

Most of the detainees were captured in Afghanistan while American troops were fighting the Taliban forces there.

Their advocates say many were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, or innocent men whom bounty hunters handed over as "terrorists" in order to claim rewards, the Times said.

The detainees are seeking only the most basic elements of due process: to be informed of the charges against them, to meet with their families and lawyers, and to have a forum for contesting their detention, the Times said.

Basic Elements

The cases the court is hearing, the paper said, involve Kuwaiti, British and Australian nationals whose families say they were not involved with al-Qaeda or engaged in military action against the United States.

The Bush administration claims that as non-citizens being held outside the United States, the detainees have no right to be heard in federal court, The Times said.

But the law gives the courts jurisdiction over "all civil actions arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States," which certainly describes these cases, the paper added.

The federal habeas corpus statute also gives anyone held by the government, which the detainees certainly are, the right to challenge their confinement, it elaborated.

The Times said even if the government's narrow view of jurisdiction were right, it is irrelevant.

Guantanamo, as the Navy concedes on its own Web site, "for all practical purposes, is American territory".

Supported

International law also strongly supports the detainees, the American paper said.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, following American and British legal traditions, states that "anyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings before a court".

Legal arguments aside, the Guantanamo policies are a tragic mistake, the Times said.

They are being followed closely abroad, where they are greatly harming America's reputation for fairness.

And - as a group of retired American military officers argue in a friend-of-the-court brief - they will come back to haunt us when Americans are taken captive, said the paper.

Most important of all, the treatment of the Guantanamo detainees is not true to America's guiding principles, according to the paper.

"The practice of arbitrary imprisonments," Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist No. 84, has been "in all ages" one of "the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny".

The Pentagon had fired a team of uniformed military lawyers hired to defend the detainees, after protesting the unfair measures taken against their clients.

Amnesty International condemned  the U.S. breaches of international law under the cover of the "war against terror".

In a letter to U.S. President George W. Bush, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said it was "deeply concerned" by reports that detainees had been subjected to torture or other forms of mistreatment while in U.S. custody.