Got to Have Habeas

Date 

Add to My Calendar Saturday, November 3, 2007 12:00am

Location 

2:30 PM - 4:00 PM

This panel discussion will take place at the 70th Annual National Lawyers Guild Convention in Washington, DC.

In early 2002, people around the world watched with dismay as the United States built a major prison camp at its naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Today, more than five years later, hundreds of prisoners continue to be held there without the formal protections provided by the U.S. Constitution and the UN Convention Against Torture, not to mention the “quaint” Geneva Conventions.

Although the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) seemed to be a small positive step toward due process, the executive branch and Republican Congress responded with the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, among other things, denied habeas corpus review to all non-U.S. citizens, even those held in the United States itself. While reports of suicides have continued to trickle from Guantánamo, backlash against the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Detainees for making disparaging comments about corporate lawyers forced him to resign last February, and Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz was sentenced in May to six months in military jail for leaking the names of detainees.

Speakers include: Gitanjali Gutierrez - Attorney, Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York; Emi MacLean- Legal Fellow, Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative; Marc Falkoff, author of Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak ; Cuban Ambassador Dagoberto Rodriguez, Washington, D.C. (invited); Marjorie Cohn, President, NLG.

Website: Register for the Convention

Last modified 

October 28, 2007