Washington, October 21: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Chinese Muslim Uighurs held in Guantanamo Bay despite being cleared of all charges, the first such hearing since Barack Obama entered the White House.
The long-running case comes after a federal judge last year ordered that the men should be released onto US soil where families from the large Uighur community are willing to host them.
But that decision was overturned on appeal, pushing their lawyers to turn to the Supreme Court in a bid to free the 13 men, who hail from the Uighur Muslim minority in China’s remote Xinjiang region.
The men, who have been held on the US military base in Cuba for more than seven years, were among 22 Uighurs living in a self-contained camp in Afghanistan when the US-led invasion of the country began in October 2001.
Amid US administration fears that they face persecution if returned to China, five were freed in 2006 and sent to Albania, and four have been resettled in Bermuda.
Another six have accepted to go to the Pacific island nation of Palau, but are still waiting to be transferred from Guantanamo. But all 13 still remaining in the jail contend they should be released in the United States.
“All counsel involved are very pleased that the court has taken up the case,” lawyer George Clarke told AFP.
“We are hopeful that the continued imprisonment of these men will soon be over and that the court will ratify the rights of Guantanamo prisoners to do more than seek — but actually to find — their release.”
It will be the fourth time that the nation’s highest legal body will examine a case brought by inmates at the notorious jail since it was opened in January 2002 under former president George W. Bush.
So far all the detainees have won their cases before the Supreme Court, and after delaying a decision on whether to hear the case for six months the nine justices will now take it up in early 2010.
President Barack Obama has pledged to close the jail that still holds some 220 people by January, although US administration officials have admitted that meeting the deadline will be complicated.
Last week, the US House of Representatives voted to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees to be brought to US soil for trial.
But the House-approved measure expressly forbids the release of detainees at the US naval base in Cuba onto US soil.
The government team tasked with assessing the detainee cases has struggled to persuade other countries to take some of the captives, with only a trickle of prisoners — some 27 — transferred since Obama’s inauguration in January.
And Obama’s Republican foes have opposed bringing detainees to US soil for trial or detention — even if they were held alongside serial murderers and rapists in high security federal prisons.
A Turkic-speaking Central Asian people, Uighurs have accused China of decades of religious, cultural and political oppression.
“I’m gratified. I hope this will certainly lead to freedom for our clients,” Sabin Willet, another lawyer for several of the Uighurs, told AFP.
“It’s certainly true that the Supreme Court acted unusually in not deciding whether they would hear it last summer. And most people think they were giving the government some time to try to make the case go away. They seem to be out of patience.”
Alim Seytoff, the general secretary of the Uighur American Association expressed hope the Supreme Court decision would “facilitate the resettlement of some Uighurs in the United States.”
In April, when the Uighurs case was first filed before the Supreme Court Emi McLean, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told AFP: “If (Obama) is truly committed to closing the detention center, these men should be on a plane to restart their lives in the United States.”
–PTI