The decision, announced in a brief order released yesterday morning, set the stage for a legal battle that could shape debates in the Bush administration about how to close the detention center, which has become a lightning rod for international criticism.
The order, which required votes from five of the nine justices, rescinded an April order in which the justices declined to review a federal appeals court decision that ruled against the detainees.
The court offered no explanation. But the order meant that the justices will hear the full appeal in their next term, perhaps by December.
The court rarely grants such motions for reconsideration. Some experts on Supreme Court procedure said they knew of no similar reversal by the court in decades.
After two Supreme Court decisions since 2004 that have been sweeping setbacks for the administration’s detention policies, the order yesterday signaled that the justices had determined to review the issues again.
“Finally, after nearly six years, the Supreme Court is going to rule on the ultimate question: does the Constitution protect the people detained at Guantánamo Bay?” said Neal K. Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor who argued the last Supreme Court case dealing with the Guantánamo detainees. In that case, decided last June, the justices struck down the administration’s planned system for war crimes trials of detainees.
The new case sets up a test of one of the central principles of the administration’s detention policies: that it can hold “enemy combatants” without allowing them habeas corpus proceedings, which have been used in English and American law for centuries to challenge the legality of detentions.
The Justice Department declined to comment in any detail on yesterday’s order, which it had strenuously opposed. “We are disappointed with the decision, but are confident in our legal arguments and look forward to presenting them before the court,” said Erik Ablin, a department spokesman.
The administration has argued that permitting habeas corpus suits by foreigners who are held as enemy combatants outside the United States would paralyze the military during wartime by giving courts the power to review commanders’ decisions. In response, Congress passed a law last year stripping the federal courts of the power to hear such habeas corpus cases filed by Guantánamo detainees.
One issue in the case is whether Congress had the power to enact that law, as a constitutional provision bars the government from suspending habeas corpus except in “cases of rebellion or invasion.”
Lawyers for many of the 375 men now held at the naval station in Cuba greeted the court’s unexpected action with euphoria. “The Supreme Court has taken a giant step toward ensuring the detainees a day in court,” said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer who represents Yemeni detainees at Guantánamo.
Lawyers for detainees had filed some 300 habeas cases, which were working their way through the courts when Congress passed the law last year. Democrats in Congress have been pressing to explicitly grant the detainees habeas rights. Some supporters said yesterday’s decision would increase political pressure for such a measure, although administration officials have said the president would probably veto it.
Even so, the court’s decision yesterday could increase momentum within the administration to find a way to close the Guantánamo detention center. President Bush and other administration officials have said that they would like to close it, but the question of where else to hold detainees who are considered too dangerous to release is a complex one.
Yesterday’s reversal by the Supreme Court suggested that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who opposed hearing the case in April, had changed his position. Although the vote tally for yesterday’s decision was not released, there have been indications that Justice Kennedy’s position on this case has been pivotal. But lawyers said it was not possible to predict how he might eventually vote in what could be a divisive issue on the court.
Lawyers on both sides of the issue also said the Supreme Court’s review was likely to focus on the fairness of the military hearings that the administration has established to determine whether detainees are enemy combatants and should be detained. In the closed hearings, conducted by what are known as combatant status review tribunals, detainees are not permitted lawyers and cannot see much of the evidence against them.
The detainees’ lawyers have said the hearings are sham proceedings that cannot substitute for reviews by federal judges. On June 22, while the Supreme Court was considering whether to reconsider its April decision, detainees’ lawyers filed an affidavit by the first military participant in the hearing process to criticize secret hearing procedures.
In the affidavit, Stephen E. Abraham, a Reserve military intelligence officer, described the process of gathering evidence as haphazard and said commanding officers exerted pressure to have the panels find that detainees were properly held as enemy combatants.
Although military officials said they disagreed with Mr. Abraham’s characterizations, lawyers involved in the case said yesterday that the affidavit might have helped convince some justices that they should more closely examine the legal procedures at Guantánamo. In the case now before the Supreme Court, the federal appeals court in Washington in February upheld the law that stripped federal judges of authority to review foreign prisoners’ challenges to their detention at Guantánamo Bay.
In the case, Boumediene v. Bush, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the 2006 law did not violate the constitutional provision that bars the government from suspending habeas corpus.
Two of the three appeals court judges said the right of habeas corpus did not extend to foreign citizens detained outside the United States. In fighting the effort to get the Supreme Court to review that decision, the administration argued that habeas corpus rights “would not extend to aliens detained at Guantánamo Bay as enemy combatants.”
The Supreme Court twice before had faced similar questions, and had ruled in 2004 that federal courts did have jurisdiction to hear Guantánamo detainees’ cases.
Last June, the court said the administration’s plan to try some of the Guantánamo detainees in military commissions was invalid and struck it down.
Language in the justices’ statements accompanying the April order had suggested maneuvering among them on whether or when they should again get involved in the tangled legal questions presented by Guantánamo.
A statement “respecting the denial” of the detainees’ requests in April was signed jointly by Justices Kennedy and John Paul Stevens. It said the detainees had to contest findings of the military hearings in the federal appeals court in Washington, as provided by Congress, before going to the Supreme Court.
But the April statement also said the Supreme Court would be open to a renewed appeal if it turned out that “the government has unreasonably delayed proceedings” or subjected the detainees to “some other and ongoing injury.”