The prisoners, captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, have been determined to pose no threat to the United States, but the government has opposed their request to be released in the United States.
In October, the court agreed to decide whether a federal judge in Washington had the power to order the men released from the prison at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, into the United States. But other countries have recently said that they would accept the detainees, and on Monday the justices said that factual developments since it had agreed to hear the case might “affect the legal issues presented.”
In an unsigned three-paragraph decision, the court erased the appeals court decision in the case and sent it back to the lower courts for re-examination.
The case involves seven prisoners at Guantánamo from the largely Muslim Uighur region of western China. The prisoners do not want to be returned to China, where they are considered terrorists and where they fear torture or execution.
In ordering the release of the detainees, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court here acknowledged that the case involved a difficult separation-of-powers question. But he said indefinite imprisonment in the circumstances was not constitutionally permissible.
“Because their detention has already crossed the constitutional threshold into infinitum and because our system of checks and balances is designed to preserve the fundamental right of liberty,” Judge Urbina wrote, “the court grants the petitioners’ motion for release into the United States.”
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Judge Urbina did not have the power to override immigration laws and force the executive branch to release foreigners into the United States.
“An undercurrent of petitioners’ arguments is that they deserve to be released into this country after all they have endured at the hands of the United States,” Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote for the majority of a three-judge panel. “But such sentiments, however high-minded, do not represent a legal basis for upsetting settled law and overriding the prerogatives of the political branches.”
Since then, the government has continued its efforts to relocate the men, and it had a breakthrough last month when Switzerland agreed to take two of the prisoners who had proved most difficult to place. Five other Uighurs at Guantánamo have rejected resettlement offers from Palau and an unidentified second country.
“No court has yet ruled in this case in light of the new facts,” Monday’s Supreme Court decision said, “and we decline to be the first.”
Instead, the justices vacated the appeals court decision and instructed that court to determine what was “necessary and appropriate for the full and prompt disposition of the case in light of the new developments.”
False starts in the court in this area are not uncommon. Last March, the court dismissed a case it had agreed to hear about whether the president had the power to detain a Qatari student in the United States as an enemy combatant.
There, too, there were factual developments after the court had agreed to hear the case; the government had transferred the former student, Ali al Marri, to the criminal justice system. And there, too, the court wiped out the lower court decision as it dismissed the case.
The central issue in Monday’s case, Kiyemba v. Obama, 08-1234, is likely to reach the court again, as there remain other cases in which prisoners cleared for release with nowhere to go remain at Guantánamo.