While conceding that “Torture is illegal under federal law, and the United States government repudiates it”, even now the Solicitor General stops short of acknowledging that torture directed, approved and implemented by officials of the United States is so repugnant that it also violates fundamental rights; no less so when hidden from public view at Guantánamo Bay. Respondents appear willing to let the final word on torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo be that government officials can torture and abuse with impunity and will be immune from liability for doing so. Yet whether United States officials are free to engage in despicable acts in a place wholly controlled by the United States is the pre-eminent constitutional issue of our time, and it is squarely presented to this Court for decision in this case.

Rasul v. Rumsfeld, as I’ve explained before, is one of the first lawsuits brought by victims of the Bush administration’s torture and abuse policies. The plaintiffs claim they were in Afghanistan to do humanitarian relief work when they were captured by the Northern Alliance and turned over (or sold for bounty) to U.S. authorities. They were eventually shipped to Guantanamo Bay, where they were imprisoned in cages and, they claim, tortured and humiliated, forced to shave their beards and watch their Korans desecrated. All of these claims are backed up by the legal memos that have since been produced from the Department of Justice that authorized such techniques as part of “enhanced” interrogations. The men were returned home to the UK without charge in 2004.

Many other victims of the Bush administration’s abuse policies have been precluded from suing because in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction over claims challenging the “detention, transfer, treatment, or conditions of confinement” of detainees who were considered “enemy combatants” by the U.S. military and detained abroad. (That provision of the law is being challenged in another lawsuit filed recently, which I describe here.) The plaintiffs in the Rasul case, however, were never even deemed “enemy combatants” by the U.S. military.

Still, the Obama administration is arguing, as it is in other cases, that it was not clear that foreigners picked up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay had a right not to be tortured by the U.S. government. But more than that, it’s arguing — as the lawyers in the Rasul case emphasize in the excerpt from their brief I quoted above — that there is no right under the Constitution not to be tortured at Guantanamo Bay, or at any offshore American-run prison.

As the Department of Justice recently wrote in another torture case: The “Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees.”

In other words, it’s not just that former detainees can’t sue Bush administration officials for torture because the law wasn’t clear back in 2002 or 2003, but the Obama administration is arguing also that there is no fundamental right not to be tortured, and therefore any government official in the future could similarly claim to be immune from a lawsuit for torture.

Eric Lewis and the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represent the four British men in the Rasul case, are now pleading with the U.S. Supreme Court to say it isn’t so, and accept their appeal from a D.C. Circuit Court ruling that dismissed the case.

The government seeks “to leave the law unsettled and to pull a cloak of immunity, now and in the future, over government torturers,” they write in their brief.

It is essential that this Court lay down a strong and clear message that officially ordered torture is abhorrent and always a violation of fundamental rights. Without this Court’s guidance, the court of appeals’ studied indifference to the torture of Guantanamo detainees remains the final word on the issue and, indeed, could provide further cover for a claim of qualified immunity in the future in the unfortunate event that the specter of torture recurs.

The men had brought the case, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, claiming that they were wrongly arrested as suspected terrorists based on racial profiling by immigration officials. They claim they were abused in detention in New York, and held for months after they were no longer suspected of being terrorists. As is usually the case with a settlement, the government did not admit wrongdoing. However, the government in 2007 charged several guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where the men were detained, with prisoner abuse.

Another case that had similarly charged abuse of prisoners after Sept. 11, Iqbal v. Ashcroft, was dismissed by a divided Supreme Court in May on the grounds that the plaintiffs there had not alleged sufficient facts of discrimination based on race, ethnicity or religion. Lawyers in the Turkmen case at the time said that they’d had more opportunity to collect evidence supporting their case because the district court had allowed it to move forward.

Two more men who are plainitffs in the Turkmen suit did not reach an agreement with the government and will continue to pursue the case. CCR is also asking the court for permission to add five more plaintiffs to the case.

JURIST has more details.

Yesterday, Jonathan Hafetz, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented Al-Marri in his challenge to military detention, told The New York Times that the sentence by a federal judge was “a powerful reminder that America’s civilian courts can deliver justice even in the most challenging circumstances.” But David Rivkin, a former Reagan-era Justice Department official and strong supporter of military commissions to try suspected terrorists had a different take. Criminal courts are “ill-suited” to terror cases because the sentences are “a crap-shoot,” he said, adding that military commissions “arrive at a better judgment, being comprised of warriors, as to what level of danger the person poses.”

Al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident living in Peoria, Ill., before his arrest in late 2001, spent almost six years in a U.S. Navy brig in South Carolina without charge, mostly in isolation. Shortly before his case questioning the legality of his indefinite detention on U.S. soil was set to reach the Supreme Court,  the Obama administration transferred him to civilian custody, incarcerated him in a federal prison and prepared for his trial in federal court. But prosecutors agreed to accept a plea bargain, in which Al-Marri admitted that he’d been ordered by al-Qaeda official Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to move to the United States from his native Qatar and await instructions. Al-Marri moved his wife and five children to Peoria and he enrolled at Bradley University, where he had studied earlier. He admitted in his plea that he “researched online information related to various cyanide compounds” and communicated with other al-Qaeda operatives.

When al-Marri was arrested in December 2001 on charges of financial fraud, he hadn’t carried out any terrorist acts. But 18 months after his arrest, the government dropped the criminal charges and named al-Marri an “enemy combatant,” which in the Bush administration’s view, gave the government the right to hold him indefinitely in military custody. He remained at the Navy big, without charge or trial, until February.

Whether it’s legal for the United States to imprison indefinitely a lawful U.S. resident in a military prison on U.S. soil remains an open question, largely because the Obama administration did not give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule on it. That may have been a strategic move designed to leave open the possibility of using that power again, particularly since President Obama promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison by January 2010, but hasn’t yet decided what to do with many of the detainees imprisoned there.

For Al-Marri, however, it means he will now serve another eight years in prison. (He faced up to 15 years, but the judge agreed to consider the time he’d already served.) Al-Marri yesterday tearfully apologized for helping al-Qaeda and said he no longer wants to harm the American people.

Notwithstanding Rivkin’s criticism of the federal court’s sentence, it’s worth noting that in the two contested cases where terror suspects were sentenced by military commissions for similarly assisting al-Qaeda, both received lighter sentences. Salim Hamdan, for example, Osama bin Laden’s driver, was sentenced by a military jury of “warriors” to just five and a half years in prison, and given credit for time served. He’s already back home in Yemen. In the other case, Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism and was sentenced to only nine months in prison. A former kangaroo-skinner, Hicks is now home.

The issue in Kiyemba v. Obama is whether the courts have the power to order an “alien” (non-U.S. resident) detainee held at Guantanamo Bay released into the United States, after determining the government has no grounds to keep holding him. But what if Congress then makes it impossible for the government to release the prisoner in the United States by withholding all necessary funding? Two separate bills signed yesterday — specifically, Sec. 1041 of the National Defense Authorization Act and Sec. 552(a) of the Homeland Security appropriations bill — appear to do just that. As Denniston points out, those laws open up a key question about Congress’ constitutional powers. In effect, it would mean that Congress could effectively suspend the prisoner’s right to habeas corpus – that is, to be released from unlawful detention.

Of course, by the time the court gets around to hearing the case this winter, President Obama may have already announced a new detainee policy, and Congress may have agreed to alter its spending restrictions. And if the Uighurs are all resettled, their case before the high court will be moot. But if the case survives until late winter, when the Supreme Court is expected to hear it, the administration and Congress may both get slapped down.

The court had previously put off deciding whether to take this case, at the request of the Obama administration, which was scrambling to find places for the Uighurs to go. But although several countries, including most recently the island of Palau, has agreed to take some of the Uighur detainees, at least one remained without a place to go. His brother, also detained, said he would not leave him.

In April, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled that even though the Uighurs were no longer considered dangerous and were being held unlawfully, the courts had no power to order the president to release anyone into the United States. Because the Uighurs cannot return to China, where they would likely be persecuted, and the U.S. government refused to release them in the United States, that left them stuck at the Guantanamo Bay prison indefinitely.

The Supreme Court now has the chance to decide whether federal courts have the power to change that.

Sotomayor didn’t intend to make a public announcement about this: she made the comments privately at a Yale Law School 30th reunion event, which she asked that reporters not be allowed to attend. State Sen. Ed Meyer, however, who also attended the event, told a reporter for the New Haven Register that Sotomayor “gave the most astounding account of how the president selected her,” talked about shopping for clothes to wear to the acceptance ceremony, and reported how government officials instead told her to bring five suits. They would tell her which one she should wear.

The federal law makes it illegal to make and sell commercially “any visual or auditory depiction” of the killing or serious abuse of a living animal so long as that conduct is illegal.

Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, appealing to the Court to reinstate the law, which was struck down by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, explained that Congress intended to shut down “a robust market” for “crush videos” — images of small animals being stomped to death.  The law, said Katyal, was a “narrowly targeted restriction.”

But Denniston reports that most of the Justices did not appear to be buying his argument. They tossed out a series of hypotheticals asking what would be banned under the law — from videos of bull-fighting to the making of foie gras — to suggest that Congress overreached on this one. Only Justice Samuel Alito, writes Denniston, seemed prepared to support the law as it was written.

Supreme Court (WDCpix)

In announcing on Wednesday that it would review a case that asks whether individuals have a fundamental right to bear arms under the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court did more than just step into a heated debate over gun control. Although McDonald v. City of Chicago is on its face about Chicago’s ban on handguns, legal experts say it also raises a far broader question of constitutional interpretation that bears on how and whether the Constitution protects a wide range of rights from state infringement. A finding that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to own a gun could therefore have the unexpected outcome of also providing more solid ground for recognition of the right to abortion, to sexual privacy, to gay marriage, and to a wide variety of other rights that conservative justices on the court and “originalist” constitutional scholars have long opposed.

The issue in the Chicago case, as defined in the petition to the court, is “[w]hether the Second Amendment is incorporated into the Due Process Clause or the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment so as to be applicable to the States, thereby invalidating ordinances prohibiting possession of handguns in the home.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The court’s decision to take the case and consider whether the Second Amendment might be “incorporated” – applicable to the states – by the “privileges or immunities clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment suggests that the court is open to reconsidering a long line of cases dating back to 1873 that read that clause narrowly and thereby restricted the ability of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect fundamental rights. Although the Supreme Court has acknowledged many rights under the Fourteenth Amendment since then, it has done so based on the more tenuous argument that they’re protected by the more limited “due process” clause, which says that the State shall not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”. Lawyers and judges have at times resorted to complicated legal gymnastics to make the argument that a newly-recognized right falls under “substantive due process.”

That argument has left those rights vulnerable to an increasingly aggressive attack by conservatives who claim judges are engaging in “judicial activism” by recognizing rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. The “privileges and immunities clause”, which states that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” has the potential to be read much more broadly.

The Privileges or Immunities Clause “was written to forbid state and local governments from trampling on the substantive fundamental rights of all Americans, thus securing the ‘unalienable rights’ to which the Declaration referred,” argues David Gans, Director of the Constitutional Accountability Center’s Human Rights, Civil Rights & Citizenship Program in a post at Balkinization.

Scholars from across the political spectrum appear to agree with him, and many joined in a brief submitted to the court in this case urging the justices to reverse the court’s longstanding precedent. In a “friend-of-the-court” brief drafted by the Constitutional Accountability Center, six constitutional law professors urged the Supreme Court to review the Chicago case and restore the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, as protecting all “privileges and immunities” not enumerated in the Constitution.

“In discussing the fundamental rights of citizenship, the framers regularly included a long list of fundamental rights – such as the right of access to the courts, the right to freedom of movement, the right to bodily integrity, and the right to have a family and direct the upbringing of one’s children – that have no obvious textual basis in the Bill of Rights,” says the brief. “These were core rights of personal liberty and personal security that belong to ‘citizens of all free governments;’ it did not matter that they were not enumerated elsewhere in the Constitution.”

The libertarian Cato Institute and Institute for Justice similarly wrote in an amicus brief to the court: “the issue of the Second Amendment’s ‘incorporation’ implicates not only the right to keep and bear arms – important enough by itself – but the larger debate over the origin, nature, and extent of all our natural rights and how the Constitution protects them.”

While the language of the privileges and immunities clause seems clear, shortly after its adoption, in 1873, in a set of cases known as the Slaughterhouse Cases (affirming Louisiana’s right to regulate slaughterhouses), the Supreme Court narrowly read the Fourteenth Amendment to protect only “privileges or immunities” conferred by federal citizenship, not by state citizenship. It specifically did not limit the state’s police powers, the court ruled. The effect of that ruling was to gut the “privileges or immunities” clause, scholars have argued, and it’s led to serious questions and confusion over when and how states can regulate rights that are thought to be fundamental but are neither specifically conferred by the federal government nor mentioned in the constitution — often called “unenumerated” rights.

Whether the constitution protects such unenumerated rights remains one of the most hotly-debated matters of constitutional interpretation, and has sharply divided the conservative and liberal wings on the court. Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, has long criticized the notion that rights such as the right to an abortion or to privacy deserves protection by the U.S. Constitution. Although the Supreme Court has recognized some of these rights, based on its interpretation of the “due process clause” of the 14th Amendment, those cases have been increasingly attacked by the conservative members of the court, and by conservative scholars, as not being grounded in the original text of the Constitution.

“You have this assault on Roe [v. Wade] from the Right, claims of judicial activism from the right, saying judges shouldn’t be doing this,” explained Doug Kendall, President of the Constitutional Accountability Center. “There’s been an aggressive assault on the entire idea that there is incorporation and that judges should have a role in protecting liberties,” said Kendall, who organized the law professors’ submission of their amicus brief. “That’s fueled the conservative rise over the last 30 years in the courts.” In response, “there’s been a flowering of scholarship that goes back to the original debates and makes an overwhelming, compelling case for the proposition that the privileges or immunities clause was intended to protect a robust set of human and civil rights.”

Constitutional scholars ranging from Akhil Reed Amar, a liberal law professor at Yale Law School, to Randy Barnett, a conservative libertarian at Georgetown University Law School, have argued in books and articles that the “privileges or immunities clause” means what it says – that the states cannot infringe on a broad range of unenumerated civil rights of citizens. As the constitutional law professors write in their brief to the Supreme Court, “the Slaughterhouse cases read the Privileges or Immunities clause so narrowly as to essentially read it out of the Amendment,” but as Amar wrote in a 2001 Yale Law Review article the brief cites: “[v]irtually no serious modern scholar – left, right and center – thinks that this is a plausible reading of the Amendment.”

Of course, if the court does decide to breathe new life into the privileges or immunities clause, it will ignite a new debate about what those rights are. But their defenders argue those rights are vast. The Ninth Amendment specifically says that “[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  The privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment, the constitutional scholars argue in their brief, “is the textual hook in the Fourteenth Amendment for protection of unenumerated fundamental rights, as well those substantive fundamental rights articulated in the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”

The law professors quote the 1866 report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which interpreted the Privileges or Immunities Clause to “afford broad protections to substantive liberty, encompassing all ‘fundamental’ rights enjoyed by ‘citizens of all free Governments’: ‘protection by the government, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject nevertheless to such restraints as the Government may justly prescribe for the general good of the whole.’“

Because the Fourteenth Amendment was focused on giving newly freed slaves the rights of citizens, says Kendall, it focused on protecting “the rights of heart and home. Your ability to control your family, your children’s education, reproductive choice and sexual intimacy.”

Not that everyone agrees with that view. A group of legal historians, for instance, filed a brief with the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the McDonald case arguing that Congress’s intent in passing the Fourteenth Amendment was unclear. But until now, the Supreme Court has never agreed to hear a case that directly raised this issue.

Even if the court wants to find that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms applies to the states, it might still sidestep the broader issue raised by this case and avoid overturning more than a hundred years’ worth of precedent. Liberals have invoked the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue for other fundamental rights, and the court could find the right to bear arms is similarly protected by the due process clause, rather than by the privileges and immunities clause. But even that would be a victory of sort for progressives, Kendall said.

“It would force Justice Scalia to utilize substantive due process” — an idea he has long criticized in the context of abortion and other controversial rights –  “to achieve the results he wants in the guns case,” said Kendall. “As long as the court finds incorporation” — that the Bill of Rights applies against the states — “it will provide a basis for undercutting Justice Scalia’s argument against it.”

For some conservatives, then, winning the right to carry a gun could turn out to by a Pyrrhic victory.

Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's alleged driver, was held in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay prison camp like these detainees. (Department of Defense photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy)

As the pressure grows on the Obama administration to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by January, so too does the risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could be returned to countries where they’ll face persecution or torture, say human rights experts. The men remaining at Guantanamo mostly come from countries that are notorious for torturing prisoners. And the Obama administration has not ruled out returning the men to those places, even though, labeled “enemy combatants” by the Bush administration, they could face retaliation back home.

Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the courts can step in and stop the administration from returning prisoners to countries known to torture. In April, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal courts have no authority to interfere with where the administration wants to send a Guantanamo detainee. The lawyers on that case, Kiyemba v. Obama, plan to appeal to the Supreme Court this month, but in the meantime, men from Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and other countries notorious for abusing prisoners could be returned to those countries over their objections. Their lawyers are now scrambling to try to stop that.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court deferred its decision in a related case on whether to review a ruling that judges have no authority to order Guantanamo detainees released into the United States. The court’s punt came in the case of 13 Uighurs, the Chinese Muslim prisoners who have been cleared for release by the U.S. government but cannot return to China for fear of persecution there. But while the Uighurs in that case have been denied the right to be released into the United States, in a way, they’re lucky; the Obama administration has said it will not return them to China.

To be sure, the administration has also promised not to send any detainees to countries where they’re likely to be tortured. But it has also said that in some situations it will accept “diplomatic assurances” from those countries that it will treat the returning detainees humanely. These are, essentially, promises from a torturing country that it won’t torture a particular individual being sent there. But how reliable are those “assurances” really?

Human rights advocates say they’re not at all.

“The record on diplomatic assurances is extremely poor,” said Joanne Mariner, Director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism program at Human Rights Watch. “It’s rare we see the text of the assurances, so it’s not clear what they consist of, and whether there’s a post-return monitoring mechanism. But there are some very well known cases in which people were sent to Egypt and Syria with diplomatic assurances, and then were tortured.”

Judy Rabinovitz, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, agrees. “We think there are real problems inherently with the reliability of such assurances and the ability to monitor them,” she said. After all, she noted, most of these countries have signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, but they’re still torturing prisoners. “When you have a country that’s notorious for torturing, how can diplomatic assurances be reliable? They know they’re not supposed to torture. They’ve signed a treaty. How is an assurance worth more than a treaty?”

One of the most infamous recent cases of torture following assurances from a foreign government involved the Canadian citizen Maher Arar, arrested at JFK airport and sent to Syria for interrogation, supposedly with diplomatic assurances that he’d be treated humanely. Arar says he was brutally tortured there. Human Rights watch has released several reports on the increasing reliance of the United States and other countries on such “diplomatic assurances,” and documented that in many cases, they have not worked. What’s more, it’s often impossible to know whether an individual returned has been tortured, since the country that returns the prisoner has no credible way of determining how he was treated, and both countries have an incentive to say the detainee was treated humanely.

Technically, the United States is bound by the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights not to send people to countries where they face a real risk of torture. (The Bush administration argued those laws did not apply to prisoners held abroad.) But as Mariner explained, that often leads those countries to rely on “diplomatic assurances” to say the risk has been diminished. That’s exactly what the Bush administration said it did when it sent terror suspects for questioning under its “extraordinary rendition” program, and many of those suspects claim they were subsequently tortured.

The choice, says Mariner, is either to trust the discretion of the executive branch, or to have some sort of system for deciding the legitimacy of the prisoner’s fears. The D.C. Circuit ruling eliminated the possibility of the federal courts playing that role. That ruling took effect in early September, clearing the way for the U.S. government to begin to return Guantanamo detainees to countries known to torture prisoners.

The administration announced earlier this week that it has cleared 75 Guantanamo detainees for release. The list includes nine prisoners from Tunisia, seven from Algeria, four from Syria, three from Libya, three from Saudi Arabia, two each from Uzbekistan, Egypt, the West Bank and Kuwait, and one each from Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. None of these countries has a strong human rights record.

About 30 of the prisoners cleared for release fear return to their home countries, said Mariner.

Ahmed Belbacha is one such prisoner at risk. He fled his home country of Algeria in 1999 during a civil war between government forces and a militant Islamic group. A former soldier in the Algerian army, he was at risk from both sides. He sought asylum in the UK, where he worked cleaning rooms in a hotel. In 2001, however, while traveling in Pakistan where he was offered free Islamic education, he was captured by the Pakistani Army and turned over to the U.S. military shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The U.S. military deemed Belbacha an “enemy combatant” because he had attended prayer services led by a fundamentalist sheik, travelled on a fake French passport and received small arms training in Afghanistan. Belbacha was sent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. But in 2007, the Bush administration decided that he did not pose a threat and cleared him for release. But by this time, Belbacha was afraid to go home; he fears retaliation and torture from both the Algerian government and radical Islamists.

In 2007, Belbacha’s lawyers told the court that they’d learned that the U.S. government planned to return their client to Algeria, and filed an emergency motion asking the court to prevent his transfer. The court ruled it did not have the power to do that, and Belbacha appealed. The court of appeals held off deciding the case though, while waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether detainees have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. (It ruled they did last year in Boumediene v. Bush.) In the meantime, the court temporarily enjoined the U.S. government from sending Belbacha to Algeria.

Then, in April, the D.C. Circuit ruled in Kiyemba v. Obama that the courts have no authority over where the government sends the men. Now, Belbacha is worried again, and his lawyers are scrambling to keep the court from issuing an order that will allow the government to transfer Belbacha to Algeria. His lawyers say he’s now even more likely to be tortured by the Algerian government if he returns there because his struggle to avoid transfer there has drawn international attention and support from human rights groups. As his lawyers put in their brief to the court: “He believes that his strenuous and widely-publicized efforts to avoid transfer to Algeria place him in the government’s crosshairs.”

Belbacha’s lawyers have filed a motion with the court asking that his case be “held in abeyance” until the lawyers handling the Kiyemba case have an opportunity to file a petition to the Supreme Court, and then until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the case. Holding the case off would leave in effect a June 2008 district court order prohibiting the government from transferring him to Algeria.

The Department of Justice, meanwhile, is vigorously fighting to lift that order, arguing that the D.C. Circuit has already decided that the courts don’t have authority to prevent a detainee’s transfer, and that the government has promised not transfer any detainee to a country where “he is more likely than not to be tortured.”

That’s not sufficient assurance for Belbacha and his lawyers, however. “The U.S. has not assured Belbacha that he won’t be sent back,” said David Remes, Executive Director of Appeal for Justice and a lawyer for Belbacha. As the law stands now, there is no court or independent arbiter to whom Belbacha can appeal.

Human rights advocates say that Algeria’s abusive treatment of two other prisoners recently returned there by the UK raises serious concerns. According to Human Rights Watch, the men were reportedly threatened and beaten in custody. Statements coerced from them were used against them at trial, and both were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment.

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees from Libya and Tajikistan who similarly fear persecution if returned home have also asked federal judges to at least temporarily prevent their clients’ transfer until the Supreme Court can consider whether courts have any authority over the administration’s decisions about where to send them.

The Obama administration, in another context, has similarly indicated that it is willing to send people to countries known to torture. In making recommendations on the transfer of terror suspects to other countries for interrogation – commonly known as renditions – an Obama administration task force recommended that renditions be permitted to countries known to practice torture, so long as the administration obtains assurances that the suspect will be treated humanely. Although the Obama administration has promised to monitor and enforce those assurances, Human Rights Watch has found that “monitoring is no panacea” because the prisoners cannot be guaranteed confidentiality. Their reports of abuse to foreign monitors would be easily traceable to them, placing them at serious risk of retaliation.

That was a contentious issue at her confirmation hearings, with Republican gun enthusiasts warning that she doesn’t support gun ownership as a “fundamental right.” Democrats — and Sotomayor — argued that she’d never had the opportunity to rule on the issue.  In one case, she’d held that the Second Amendment did not forbid states from regulating gun possession, but she’d ruled based on her reading of what Supreme Court precedent required, she said.

Today, the court announced it would take a new gun case, McDonald v. Chicago, that will directly address the issue that’s so far been left undecided: whether the Second Amendment provides a “fundamental right” that states must respect.

The Chicago law at issue in this case bans virtually all handguns. A previous ruling from the Supreme Court, Heller v. District of Columbia, struck down a similar ban but applied only to the federal government’s authority to regulate handguns.