Federal court rules secret US 'terror' courts are illegal

Civil liberties groups in the United States claimed a landmark victory against the Bush administration yesterday after a federal appeals court forcefully condemned the government's policy of holding foreign nationals after the 11 September attacks and arranging secret deportations.

The sixth circuit court of appeals, in Cincinnati, ordered the government to open deportation hearings to the public. It accused the Justice Department of subverting America's democratic values by trying "to uproot people's lives, outside the public eye and behind a closed door".

The unanimous ruling said: "Democracies die behind closed doors. A government operating in the shadow of secrecy stands in complete opposition to the society envisioned by the framers of our Constitution." The strong language made this ruling the most forceful, but far from the first, judicial condemnation of the administration's "war on terrorism".

This month, another federal court ordered the Justice Department to name all suspects held since 11 September, most without charge, on minor immigration violations.

Civil liberties' groups say the approach taken by President George Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft, has done more demonstrable harm to American democracy than any of the hundreds of detainees deported in the past 11 months. Speaking of the ruling, Lucy Dalglish of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press."I want to weep it's so good."

The ruling is a particularly serious blow to Mr Ashcroft, an extreme conservative who has managed to infuriate lawyers, civil rights' advocates and defenders of the constitution across the political spectrum.

For all the arrests, secret detentions and deportations he has ordered, his department has managed just two terror-related criminal prosecutions, against Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged "20th hijacker" who was already in custody on 11 September, and against John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban.

The Cincinnati ruling related to Rabih Haddad, the co-founder of an Islamic charity, who has been in solitary confinement without charge since December.As documented by The Independent last February, the government has yet to present a shred of evidence against him. He has had three secret deportation hearings, and might have been thrown out of the country already were it not for the intervention of the federal courts.

Mr Haddad is among an estimated 2,000 or so foreign nationals to have been caught in the government's maw. Exact figures are impossible to cite because the Justice Department stopped issuing them at the end of last year. As of late June, the government said 81 people remained in custody on immigration violations, suggesting that at least 1,900 had been deported.

The Cincinnati ruling said the lack of official information was in itself a violation of the compact that binds the US government and its citizens. "When the government begins closing doors," the judges wrote, "it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation."

The Justice Department would not immediately say whether it would appeal the Cincinnati ruling in the Supreme Court. In an initial statement, it said its first priority was to prevent further terror attacks and protect the American people.