Guantanamo Bay, habeas corpus and the Texan who would be king: Some legal

[Euphen]

Guantanamo Bay, habeas corpus and the Texan who would be king: Some legal observations
By Richard Hoffman
5 January 2004

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Whilst the conduct of the US administration in Guantanamo Bay is viewed universally as an affront to human rights and the rule of law, it is in fact symptomatic of a broad repudiation by erstwhile bourgeois democratic states throughout the world to legal-constitutional principles of government.

What we are witnessing is a crisis of rulership—manifested in the juridical sphere—of world historical significance. The Bush administration and other governments, including the Australian government, are seeking to change the relationship between individuals and the state—in fact, seeking to reverse it completely—and to turn the clock back 800 years on fundamental legal conceptions that have governed individual-state relations. The Bush administration wants to return relations of power to the position possibly pre the Magna Carta of 1215, and certainly pre 1640.

Arbitrary indefinite detention is now widespread. In Australia hundreds of asylum seekers are detained and many have been incarcerated for years with no apparent prospect of release because the government has refused to give them visas and no state on the planet will receive them. It is truly a nightmarish condition that not even Kafka could have imagined. Writs of habeas corpus have been issued in various cases to seek the release of such people on the basis that, simply put, a human being, having committed no crime and being stateless, is entitled to his liberty.

People are being held in various countries on the pretext of “anti-terrorism”. The same arbitrary exercise of power by the executive is holding sway. In Australia, as in the United States, laws have been implemented that suspend the rights of the individual to legal process and subject them to executive power with impunity. The WSWS has comprehensively reported on these developments. What is important to understand is that there is a unifying process at work here—whether it be detention centres set up by the Australian government in Nauru or Papua New Guinea to detain asylum seekers and deny them a jurisdictional connection with the Australian legal system, or Guantanamo Bay—to deny access to the US legal system. The underlying process is the destruction of the established legal and constitutional framework.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/habe-j05.shtml

[izzie]

1. I do not think any one wants to go back to Runnymede but.....

every one does seem to be worried about unwanted people in their countries and are doing odd things with these people. And Bush and Co are bring the odd people here or Cuba.Lets hope it goes not one step more. The rulers are a little off the wall.