Uighurs ask Supreme Court to free them from Guantánamo - Breaking News - MiamiHerald.com

Uighurs ask Supreme Court to free them from Guantánamo - Breaking News - MiamiHerald.com

Attorneys for 17 Muslims from China locked up inside a prison camp at Guantánamo asked the U.S. Supreme Court Friday to take on the case of the men whom a judge ordered set free eight months ago.



''The historic role of the Judicial Branch is to demand the release of prisoners precisely when the political branches find release inconvenient,'' the 16-page appeal said.

Ignoring the case of the Uighurs, men from a Muslim minority in China who won a lawsuit in a lower court, would signify ''a hobbled judiciary,'' they argued.

The appeal comes at a time of tension surrounding the case of the Uighurs, 17 men whom China brands terrorists from an Islamic separatist movement in Xinjiang province.

At Guantánamo Monday, several of them staged a brief poster-board protest inside their half-acre fence- and barbed-wire enclosed compound, Camp Iguana, while journalists inspected the lockup.

In self-taught, broken prison-camp English, they asked to be freed, likened democracy to communism and branded the United States a ''double Hetler,'' an apparent reference to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The Uighurs are approaching their eighth year in U.S. detention. Pakistani and Afghan allies turned them over to U.S. troops during their 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. They were sent to Guantánamo as suspected al Qaeda trainees and sympathizers.

Five were cleared by 2006 and sent to Albania because the State Department concluded that China would persecute them in their homeland.

But the Bush and Obama administrations have been unable to find any nation to grant asylum to the last 17, and have so far refused to release them on U.S. soil.

Now the Uighurs' lawyers argue that, after eight months, the White House is defying U.S. District Court Judge Richard Urbina. In October, Urbina examined their habeas corpus petition, ruled they were unlawfully detained at Guantánamo and ordered them taken to the United States.

An appeals court blocked the transfer, at Bush administration request. Since then, Attorney General Eric Holder has said some of them could be settled in the United States. Members of Congress responded with alarm, as did a pro-Guantánamo lobby called Military Families United, which argues that any paramilitary training they undertook in Afghanistan makes them terrorists.

And so the Uighur filing asks the justices to intervene.

''Should this petition for certiorari fail, the federal courts will have sanctioned, within their jurisdiction, unlawful executive imprisonment that may yet extend the indefinite to the infinite,'' they concluded.

There are only about 1,000 or so Uighurs living in the United States and though campaigners liken their plight in China to that of the Tibetans, few people heard of them before the 17 at Guantánamo turned to U.S. courts to free them.

Now Massachusetts Rep. Bill Delahunt, a Democrat, has called a hearing next week at his House Foreign Affairs Oversight Subcommittee to let some Uighurs and historians tell their story.

''Americans understand the Tibetan struggle, but are not yet familiar with the persecution of Uighurs in China, and the circumstances surrounding the apprehension and detention of the Uighurs at Guantánamo,'' he wrote in a hearing announcement.