courts
742 Articles

Reforming the FISA Court
There has been much discussion, on the pages of this blog and elsewhere (here, here, and here to name just a few), about the procedural shortcomings of the FISA Court — the lack…

Salvadoran General Deemed Deportable In the Absence of Criminal Charges
UPDATE: Former Defense Minister of El Salvador, Vides Casanova, has been detained pending extradition. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) ruled last week that General Carlos…

Wall Street Journal Grants Anonymity to al-Qaeda’s “First Easily Accessible Media Liaison”
The Wall Street Journal today quotes at length from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) “first easily accessible media liaison” and explicitly grants the source…

Supreme Court Denies Cert in Samantar v. Yousuf
On Monday, the US Supreme Court denied certiorari in Samantar v. Yousuf, ending an attempt by the former Prime Minister of Somalia to claim that the torture and extrajudicial killing…

Another Successful Terrorism Trial Inside the US
Khaled Abdul Rahman Hamad al-Fawwaz was stoic as his fate was announced, staring straight ahead, unflinching, his face blank, wearing the same white Islamic kufi on his head and…

European Court: U.S. Troops Can Apply for Asylum to Avoid Participating in War Crimes, But …
A US Army soldier loads rockets onto an AH-64 Apache helicopter in Europe. Credit: US Army. On Thursday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) issued a decision holding that American…

Judge Pohl’s rebuke of DOD’s unorthodox effort to accelerate the 9/11 trial
[UPDATED at 6:00 p.m. with links to, and some discussion of, DoD rationales and the regulatory amendment itself.] Things have been moving very slowly, to say the least, in the…

General Martins on the Shrinking Military Commissions
Marty’s important post from last night includes a link to yesterday’s statement by General Mark Martins, Chief Prosecutor of the Guantánamo military commissions, in…

Al-Nashiri can now speak about his treatment … plus news about full SSCI Report
[Editor’s note: This post was originally published at 9:00 PM E.S.T. on February 22, 2015] Two weeks ago, I reported here that the prosecution had submitted motions to the…

Authorization vs. Regulation of Detention: What Serdar Mohammed v. MoD Got Right and Wrong
The UK Court of Appeal will soon hear the appeal in Serdar Mohammed v. Ministry of Defense, a highly important case in which the UK High Court held that the long-term detention…

UK Court of Appeal to assess legality of detentions in Afghanistan
Next week, the United Kingdom Court of Appeal will begin to hear arguments in the government’s appeal against the High Court ruling in Serdar Mohammed v Ministry of Defense.…

The D.C. Circuit, Samoan Citizenship, and the Insular Cases
Much has already been written about next Tuesday’s D.C. Circuit argument in In re al-Nashiri, an important case arising out of the Guantánamo military commissions. The…