A US court today dismissed the case of an American man trying to establish whether the U.S. can assassinate its own citizens, without telling them why or offering them their constitutional right to due process.<\/p>\n
While acknowledging that there may be no \u2018constitutional right more essential than the right to due process\u2019, Judge Rosemary Collyer of the DC District Court said the federal courts nonetheless were blocked from weighing in on the matter because the government had invoked state secrets. In doing so, the US government is protected from having to disclose the very information necessary to Mr Kareem\u2019s claim of due process – the allegations against him, which led to him being targeted in the first place.<\/p>\n
Mr Kareem alleges that he was nearly killed by US missiles on five separate occasions in 2016, while working as a journalist in Syria. In June 2018, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held that he could plausibly infer that he had been placed on the \u2018kill list\u2019 \u2013 and that the Government must afford him his due process right to find out why.<\/p>\n
The Government\u2019s lawyers subsequently sought to have the case thrown out on the grounds that it would prejudice national security if state secrets were to be revealed at trial \u2013 effectively arguing that the U.S. drone programme operates beyond the reach of the Constitution, even when it targets Americans.<\/p>\n
Jennifer Gibson, Staff Attorney at Reprieve and co-counsel for Mr Kareem,<\/strong> said: “Today, a court ruled that the US Government could kill an American citizen without due process. In so doing, it allowed the Trump Administration to run roughshod over the Constitution and tacitly approved the executive\u2019s exercise of unfettered power over its citizens in the name of \u2018national security. Yet again, the Government has been allowed to wield excessive power, and hide behind the spectre of \u2018national security\u2019 to deprive people of their most basic of rights: the right to life and due process.”<\/p>\n