Germany/USA: Court upholds Guantanamo prisoner’s residency rights
01 November 2005
Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born and brought up in Germany, was seized in Pakistan in 2001 and taken to the US military prison at Guantanamo where he has been held since without being charged or receiving adequate legal support. In August 2004, the Bremen authorities abruptly revoked Kurnaz's indefinite residency permit because he had been out of Germany for over six months and had not reapplied. Thomas Röwekamp, the Senator for Interior Affairs in Bremen said that:
if [Kurnaz] were to arrive now at a German airport with his passport and ask for permission to enter, he wouldn't be allowed to enter the country.
On 30 November 2005, however, the regional administrative court in Bremen overturned this decision by the Aliens Office. Kurnaz has a German and a US lawyer fighting for his release from illegal US imprisonment and for the right to return to Germany, but he has received no support from the German authorities.
Background: detained without evidence
Murat Kurnaz's case became public in late 2004, when he challenged his classification by the Bush administration as an "unlawful combatant" in a Washington DC court; this challenge was in response to a Supreme Court ruling of June 2004 that said that Guantanamo Bay fell under US federal law and thereby allowed Guantanamo detainees to challenge their imprisonment. Following this ruling the military began holding new review tribunals.
The US citizens’ rights organisation
The Center for Constitutional Rights has demanded an examination of the Kurnaz case, upon which Kurnaz's lawyer Baher Azmy was for the first time allowed to speak with his client. In Kurnaz's case, a tribunal panel made up of three unnamed officers, an Air Force colonel, a lieutenant colonel and a Navy lieutenant commander, concluded that he was an al Qaeda member whom the government could detain indefinitely. In March 2005, allegedly through an administrative slip-up, the evidence against Kurnaz was declassified and it became public that in their decision, the military tribunal had deliberately ignored US military intelligence and German law enforcement information admitting that there was no proven link between Kurnaz and al Qaeda structures or any involvement in terrorist activities.
In a Court ruling of January 2005, Federal Judge, Joyce Hens Green, criticised the military panel for ignoring this exculpatory information and for relying instead on a short and unsupported memo filed by an unidentified government official shortly before Kurnaz's hearing. Green ruled that Kurnaz' detention violated the US constitution and the Geneva Convention. The
Washington Post, which gained access to the declassified evidence, reported that the Command Intelligence Task Force (CITF), the investigative arm of the US Southern Command that oversees the Guantanamo Bay facility:
repeatedly suggested that it may have been a mistake to take Kurnaz off a bus of Islamic missionaries travelling through Pakistan in October 2001.
One document says that:
CITF has no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or making any specific threat against the US
and that:
CITF is not aware of evidence that Kurnaz was or is a member of Al Qaeda.
The statement: "We could not find anything which would incriminate Mr Kurnaz" by Bremen criminal prosecutor Uwe Picard has been widely reported. The Bremen authorities had started preliminary investigations into Kurnaz's alleged terrorist links after his arrest in Pakistan. On its web-site on Guantanamo Bay prisoners, Amnesty International says that:
German investigators have cast doubt on whether Murat Kurnaz was involved in any illegal activity. They have stated that in all likelihood he had never been in Afghanistan, much less that he had become involved in the international conflict there. His German lawyer, Bernhard Docke, has stressed that Murat Kurnaz spoke no Arabic, very<