Attorneys for the detained Uighurs, Muslim natives of western China who oppose their country's Communist rule, are scheduled to petition the court as early as today. They seek a break in the impasse created when U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled last month that the Bush administration's "Kafka-esque" detention of the Uighurs was illegal but he simultaneously determined that the court lacked the power to overrule the president and free them.
"That ruling doesn't simply hit innocent men now in their fifth year of imprisonment," said Sabin Willett, one of the Uighurs' attorneys. "It goes to whether we have a judicial branch at all. This is that rare question so vital that the Supreme Court should immediately intervene to answer."
Lawyers for the nine Chinese detainees plan to urge the Supreme Court to step into the void, arguing in draft legal documents they provided to The Washington Post that the high court and the public have a major stake when the federal judiciary decides it cannot stop the president from continuing to break the law.
...The attorneys for the detainees are asking the high court to let their clients skip the year-long process of first appealing to the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia and resolve the conundrum of a ruling without relief and what they call the "absurdity" of illegal imprisonment without end.
Lawyers working on behalf of the Uighurs argue that Robertson's decision effectively "proclaims an Executive with unchecked power . . . to seize and perpetually imprison persons from around the globe."
"The prospect of innocent men detained indefinitely, and of an Executive wielding powers beyond those granted to it by the Constitution . . . is simply intolerable," they wrote.
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