FURTHER UPDATE Friday a.m. “Kiyemba II” has now been docketed as 09-581.
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UPDATE Thursday p.m. A reader notes that the outcome of this case, besides affecting some 150 cases involving advance notice orders, also will affect a number of cases in which federal judges have issued binding orders against transfers from Guantanamo. A ruling on the validity of notice orders presumably would settle the legality of such injunctions, too.
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Urging the Supreme Court to broaden its new review of government policy on transfers of detainees out of Guantanamo Bay, attorneys for four Chinese Muslim Uighurs filed a new case Tuesday evening. If the Court were to grant review, it would focus the Justices’ attention on two layers of dispute between the Executive Branch and the courts, both perhaps affecting President Obama’s plans to close Guantanamo early next year. The issues in the new case and in an earlier one, granted review by the Court on Oct. 20, “are distinct,” Tuesday’s petition said. Moreover, the legal issue at stake in the new case is present in more than 150 pending detainee cases in lower courts.
The Uighurs’ lawyers, though, suggested that the Court, as an alternative, may wish to hold the new case until it decides their first appeal. “If the Court believes that it would benefit from a decision” in the first case, they said, it could defer action on the second one. This first one “broadly relates to judicial authority under habeas jurisdiction and the Due Process Clause,” and the decision there thus may have some bearing on the second one, the petition noted.
Both cases bear the title, Kiyemba, et al., v. Obama, et al. The granted case, now known informally as “Kiyemba I,” is docketed as 08-1234. It is probably going to be heard in February or March. The newly filed case — “Kiyemba II” — does not yet have a docket number. (The D.C. Circuit Court ruling at issue in Kiyemba II can be found here.) Read the rest of this entry »