Only four days before President George W Bush chose him as his nominee for the Supreme Court, John Roberts ruled to give the administration a free hand in holding military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, critics claimed this week.
Bush sent his candidate to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet senators who will ultimately decide Judge Roberts’s confirmation. After a series of fiercely contested Senate confirmation hearings, Bush said he hoped that this time the judge’s hearings would ”move forward in a dignified, civil way”.
In their initial reactions, most Democratic senators gave Judge Roberts, a softly-spoken conservative, a cautious, but not hostile, reception.
Congressional observers said Judge Roberts’s relative lack of experience as a judge — only two years on a federal appeals court — could help his confirmation, as he has left few momentous rulings in his wake that could be subject to attack.
However, human rights lawyers pointed to a decision made only last Friday, when Judge Roberts was on a three-judge panel at the federal appeals court in Washington, which rejected claims by a Guantanamo inmate, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, that the military tribunals violated international and US law.
The court’s opinion was written by another judge on the panel, but supported by Judge Roberts. It ruled that when Congress gave the president the authority to use ”all necessary and appropriate force” to fight terrorism, it also gave him the right to set up tribunals for suspected terrorists under any rules he deemed necessary.
The ruling provoked an outcry. ”It’s of great concern for everyone working on human rights issues because it makes it look like there is no enforcement of the Geneva conventions,” said Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York.
But government critics in the US are more likely to focus on Judge Roberts’s attitude towards abortion. As deputy solicitor general for the first president Bush, he defended the government’s withdrawal of federal funds from family planning organisations that mentioned abortion in their counselling of clients. — Â