Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008)

American intelligence officers suspected Lakhdar Boumediene and five other Algerian citizens of planning to attack the U.S. embassy in Bosnia, after which Bosnian police arrested them. They were detained at Guantanamo Bay because they were considered to be enemy combatants in the war on terror. In his ensuing petition for a writ of habeas corpus, Boumediene argued that this violated due process under the Constitution as well as international law, the common law, and certain statutes and treaties. The trial court judge dismissed the case because he was a non-citizen at an overseas military base, so the right of habeas corpus did not apply. The Supreme Court later reversed the rule that the lower courts applied in Rasul v. Bush (2004) and held that habeas corpus protections do extend to Guantanamo Bay detainees. Congress responded by passing the Military Commissions Act, which expressly prevented federal courts from hearing habeas petitions by detainees classified as enemy combatants. Boumediene and the other Algerians claimed that the Act did not apply to their habeas petitions, and alternatively that it was unconstitutional under the Suspension Clause. However, the lower court held in favor of the government, finding that the MCA was designed to overrule the Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), which found that there was such a right to habeas petitions. In interpreting the Suspension Clause, the lower court ruled that its protections should be interpreted in terms of how they were understood when the clause was written in 1789. As a result, they should not be applied to overseas military bases leased from a foreign government because those could not have been contemplated in 1789. The Framers would not have intended constitutional rights to apply to foreign nationals outside the U.S., and a military base on territory leased from Cuba does not qualify as part of the U.S.

Whether aliens designated as enemy combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus, and whether the procedures provided by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 are an adequate and effective substitute for that privilege.

The judgment is reversed.

The right of habeas corpus should be applied broadly unless the government has specifically invoked the Suspension Clause or provided a sufficient alternative, neither of which applied here.