[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website; JURIST news archive] on Monday declined to hear [order list, PDF] a lawsuit by four UK citizens and former Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detainees against former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld [JURIST news archive] and other military officials. The Court denied certiorari in Rasul v. Myers [docket; cert. petition, PDF], leaving in tact a ruling [opinion, PDF; JURIST report] by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit [official website]. The appeals court had affirmed in part a district court decision dismissing illegal detention and mistreatment charges under the Alien Tort Statute [text], the Geneva Conventions [ICRC materials], and the Fifth and Eighth Amendments [text] of the US Constitution against Rumsfeld and other military officials, and reversed the lower court's decision to reject a motion for dismissal of two additional charges against the defendants. The appeals court ruling came after the Supreme Court vacated and remanded to the district court [JURIST report] the DC Circuit's 2008 decision in the same case, which also dismissed the lawsuit against Rumsfeld and the other defendants.

UK citizens Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed, and Jamal Al-Harith were released from Guantanamo in March 2004. In May 2004, Rasul and Iqbal said in an open letter to then-US president George W. Bush that they had suffered abuse at Guantanamo [JURIST report] similar to that perpetrated at Abu Ghraib [JURIST news archive] prison in Iraq. The Center for Constitutional Rights [advocacy website] filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] on their behalf in October 2004 against Rumsfeld, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Meyers, and others alleging [complaint] "deliberate and foreseeable action taken … to flout or evade the United States Constitution, federal statutory law, United States treaty obligations and long established norms of customary international law."