Rasul v. Bush

Rasul v. Bush, case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 28, 2004, that U.S. courts have jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions filed on behalf of foreign nationals imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because the base, which the United States has held under lease from Cuba since 1899, was effectively within U.S. territory. The implication of the decision was that hundreds of foreign nationals held at the camp had a legal right to challenge their imprisonment.

The case originally concerned four British and Australian citizens, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Mamdouh Habib, and David Hicks, who had been seized in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001–02 and eventually turned over to U.S. authorities. The four men were transferred to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, where they were held without charge, trial, or access to counsel. In 2002, Rasul, Iqbal, and Hicks challenged their detentions in U.S. district court, arguing that they had not engaged in combat against the United States or in any terrorist acts and that their detention amounted to a violation of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. Habib filed a similar suit three months later. Hearing the first case, Rasul v. Bush, together with a similar case involving 12 Kuwaiti citizens, al Odah v. Bush, the district court dismissed the challenges, holding on the basis of Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950) that foreign nationals imprisoned abroad may not file habeas corpus petitions in U.S. courts because the jurisdictions of such courts are limited to territory within the United States. The court later dismissed Habib v. Bush on the same grounds. After these decisions were affirmed by a court of appeals, the Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari to hear the consolidated cases as Rasul v. Bush, and oral arguments were heard on April 20, 2004. (While the case was pending, the petitioners Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal were released from detention at Guantánamo and set free in the United Kingdom upon their arrival there.) In a 6–3 ruling, issued on June 28, the court overturned the lower courts’ decisions. Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens held that, although Cuba retains “ultimate sovereignty,” the “plenary and exclusive” jurisdiction exercised by the United States over the territory of the Guantánamo Bay naval base was sufficient to guarantee habeas corpus rights to foreign nationals held there.