Human Rights First Welcomes Pentagon Announcement Allowing Jose Padilla Access
to Counsel

NEW YORK-- The Defense Department said on Wednesday that Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been held in incommunicado military confinement without charges for nearly two years, will be allowed access to a lawyer. Padilla was arrested in Chicago O’Hare Airport during the summer of 2002, and the President has asserted power to detain him indefinitely as a combatant seized in the course of the “war on terror.”

“We are gratified that the Pentagon has at long last agreed to let Jose Padilla talk to a lawyer. But that is just the first step,” said Deborah Pearlstein, who directs the U.S. Law and Security Program at Human Rights First. “Whether we are at war or not, all U.S. citizens are entitled to some process for evaluating the legality of their detention under the Constitution.”

The Pentagon’s decision comes on the heels of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in December that the President lacks any constitutional or statutory authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens seized on American soil. Yet as it did in announcing that it would be afford another citizen-detainee, Yaser Hamdi, access to a lawyer, the Pentagon reiterated its position that such access was only being granted “as a matter of discretion and military policy,” not to comply with any requirement of domestic or international law. The Pentagon maintains that its decision for Mr. Padilla should not in any way “be treated as a precedent” to be used in any other citizen’s case.

The decision to allow Mr. Padilla access to a lawyer was announced just after final briefing was completed in the administration’s pending appeal of the Second Circuit’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. “We believe that the appeals court got it right in this case,” Pearlstein said. “Ours is a government of limited powers, and no one in it – not even the President – can exercise power without some independent check that his actions are within the law.”