Professor Amann Comments on Preventive Detention for NY Times Online
Professor Diane Marie Amann contributed a commentary on President Obama's plans for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center to "Room for Debate," a feature of the New York Times website. Professor Amann noted Obama's stated determination to close the facility, but also criticized the administration's apparent intention to allow preventive detention of some terrorism suspects. Professor Amann writes that the plan does have some precedents in "the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Japanese internment of the 1940s, but they are widely seen as low points in America's history under the Constitution."
"No amount of procedures can justify deprivations that, because of their very nature violate the Constitution's core guarantee of liberty," Professor Amann states.
The remarks were also quoted in two Berlin-based, German language papers, Die Tageszeitung and Neues Deutschland.
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.