A Guantanamo Bay detainee who lent his name to a landmark Supreme Court case was released from custody today and flown out of the military base in Cuba to join relatives in France, according to government and diplomatic sources.
His release came on a day when President Obama is expected to announce that he will resume military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, but with greater legal protections for defendants than had been given in the past.
France agreed this month to accept Lakhdar Boumediene, a 43-year-old Algerian who was arrested with five compatriots in Bosnia in 2001. The six were accused of involvement in a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. But a U.S. federal judge ordered five of the six released last November after he said the evidence against them was not credible.
Three of the six were flown in December back to Bosnia, where they were naturalized citizens. The fate of Sabir Lahmar, 39, who was ordered released but does not have Bosnian citizenship, remains undetermined.
Boumediene does not have French citizenship but has relatives in France, which led the government there to accept him as a gesture to the Obama administration. The Algerian has been on hunger strike since late 2006 to protest his continued incarceration, and medical personnel in Guantanamo have force-fed him to keep him alive.
Boumediene was the named plaintiff in a Supreme Court case that was decided in June, when the justices ruled in a 5-4 opinion in June that Guantanamo Bay detainees have the right to petition federal district courts to review their detention. The case known as Boumediene v. Bush extended the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus to the detainees, who now number 240.
In all, the courts have ordered the release of 25 detainees, including 17 Chinese Uighurs.
Boumediene is the second prisoner transferred by the Obama administration to a country other than the prisoner’s country of citizenship . In February, Binyam Mohamed, a native of Ethiopia who had lived in Britain, was returned to the United Kingdom.
The Obama administration has begun diplomatic negotiations with European and other states in an effort to resettle dozens of detainees who have been cleared for release but cannot be returned home because of the fear that they would face torture or execution in those nations. State Department officials have presented the German government with a list of nine Uighurs they would like to send there, but the government in Berlin said it has not received enough information to make a decision.
Most European governments also insist that the Obama administration settle some small group of detainees in the United States before they do the same in their countries. Opposition has been growing on Capitol Hill, however, to any resettlement program on American soil. A legislative ban on taking detainees here could scuttle European cooperation, according to human rights activists and diplomats.
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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051501418.html
