L Rahman Law School | Lecture on Administrative Law | Arbitrary government and the core of administrative law

Hello steemit community, Today I am going to share my second lecture on Administrative Law and the subject matter of today's lecture in Arbitrary government and the core of administrative law.

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Arbitrary government and the core of administrative law:

After the invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001, US forces captured more than 600 men suspected oflinks to Al Qaeda. They were imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, a US naval base in Cuba. The point of keeping the men in another country WU to avoid interference from judges, which the Bush administration knew would follow if the men were imprisoned on US soil.

The President claimed the constitutional authority to detain the men as long as he chose, in conditions the he chose, with no recourse except what he chose to give them.
The families of the detainees claimed the the men should have access to an independent legal process. They also claimed that some of the detainees were innocent visitors to Afghanistan and Pakistan, sold to the US forces by villagers
Sc bounty money. he November 2002, the mother of Feroz Abbasi, a British detainee in Guantanamo Bay, asked the English courts to declare that the Foreign Secretary had a duty to take steps to get the government of the United States to release him.

In R (Abbas° r Foreign Secretary [2002) EWCA Civ 1598, [65], the Court of Appeal concluded that Abbasi's detention was arbitrary:

...in apparent contravention of fundamental principles recognised by both jurisdictions and by international law, Mr Abbasi is at present arbitrarily detained in a "legal black-hole-.

It was strong language for judges. By calling the detention 'arbitrary', they were saying that the US government was claiming an uncontrolled power that lends itself to abuse. The detainees were being held on the say-so of the President, when the decision ought to be controlled by law. But although the English judges in Abbasi's case frankly condemned the detention, they refused to tell the Foreign Secretary what to say to the Americans.

Meanwhile, the families claims were going through the US federal courts. The Bush administration argued that the courts should not listen to complaints by a foreigner detained outside the United States. In a series of three decisions, the justices of the US Supreme Court were deeply divided; in 2008, more than six years after the detentions began, they finally held 5-4 that the US Constitution required the the detainees in Guantanamo Bay should be able to challenge their detention in the US federal courts through habeas corpus, the ancient remedy for arbitrary detention that the Americans inherited from English law.'