Professor Amann Comments on Federal Ruling for Washington Independent

Professor Diane Marie Amann commented for the Washington Independent on a petition for a U.S. Supreme Court review of a Court of Appeals decision finding that federal courts may not order Guantánamo Bay detainees whom the government has conceded are not enemy combatants released into the United States.

The ruling in Kiyemba v. Obama most directly impacts the 17 prisoners who belong to the Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic group in China.  They were cleared for release in 2004 but remain in custody because they likely would suffer persecution in  China, and no other nation has agreed to take them.  In the Kiyemba case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that even though the government has no grounds for holding the men, federal courts cannot order their release into the United States, a ruling that has been criticized as an evisceration of the prisoners' right to habeas corpus, which was confirmed by the Supreme Court in June.

"There are no exceptions to the habeas provision as written in the Constitution that would permit this kind of detention," Professor Amann commented.

Diane Marie Amann is a Professor at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California International Law Center at King Hall.  Issues related to post-9/11 detention, interrogation, and prosecution are a focus of her scholarship, with articles published in Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.