U.S judge struck down President George W Bush’s

by admin
November 30th, 2006

A federal judge struck down President George W Bush’s authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-September 11 executive order was unconstitutionally vague, according to a ruling released on Tuesday.The Humanitarian Law Project had challenged Bush’s order, which blocked all the assets of groups or individuals he named as “specially designated global terrorists” after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

“This law gave the President unfettered authority to create blacklists,” David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, DCbased Centre for Constitutional Rights that represented the group, said on Tuesday. “It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era.” The case centred on two groups, the Liberation Tigers, which seeks a separate homeland for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, and Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan, a political organisation representing the interests of Kurds in Turkey.

US district judge Audrey Collins enjoined the government from blocking the assets of the two groups. Both consider the November 21 ruling a victory; both had been designated by the US as terrorist organisations. Cole said the ruling does not invalidate the hundreds of other designated terrorist groups on the list but “calls them into question”.Charles Miller, a spokesman for the US department of justice, said: “We are currently reviewing the decision and we have made no determination what the government’s next step will be.”

A White House spokeswoman declined to immediately comment. At the time of his order creating the list, Bush declared that the “grave acts of terrorism” and the “continuing and immediate threat of future attacks” constituted a national emergency. The judge’s 45-page ruling on Tuesday was a reversal of her own tentative findings last July in which she indicated she would uphold wide powers asserted by Bush under an antiterror financing law. She delayed her ruling then to allow more legal briefs to be filed. She also struck down the provision in which Bush had authorised the secretary of the treasury to designate anyone who “assists, sponsors or provides services to” or is “otherwise associated with” a designated group.