Hot on the heels of yesterday's UK ruling, which represented a blow to the government's legislative approach to terrorism, comes a ruling by the US Supreme Court that President Bush exceeded his authority in determining that the individuals classified as 'unlawful combatants' could be tried by military tribunals.
In one sense, this could be seen as the predictable consequence of the convolutions the Bush administration went through in order to neutralise these people while keeping them isolated from the judicial process. They could not be classified as 'civilian' prisoners because that would mean admitting them to the civil legal process; they could not be classified as 'prisoners of war', because that would mean according them the rights set out under the Geneva Conventions. The use of detention centres in third party countries such as Cuba, Iraq itself and elsewhere, similarly, was a step which seems designed to bypass the constraints of national and international law.
Given how difficult that has made it to thread a course between these various potential sources of interference, it's hardly surprising that one of the inconsistencies would at some point come to the judicial crunch-point.
It's interesting that the Court ruled that the military tribunal "proceedings violated Geneva Conventions"... because that kind of implies that the Court considers those conventions to apply in the first place.
Unfortunately for the detainees, the ruling seems unlikely to mean any change in their treatment - only that the military tribunal process will probably be brought to a halt. Presumably if a government appeal against the ruling fails, there will then be a protracted argument about whether (or how) they could be tried in civil courts instead.
Here's a more detailed analysis of military tribunals and the arguments put forward against them and in their favour.
![[RSS Newsfeed]](/themes/sotto/images/valid-rss.png)
![[This is a Roller site]](/themes/sotto/images/roller-logo.gif){kind=logo}