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Gul Mohammed

Gul Mohammed

 

Gul Mohammed

Gul Mohammed is one of the detainees held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on whose behalf a petition for writ of habeas corpus was filed in the Washington D.C. court system in 2006. As of that year, Gul Mohammed was a citizen of Afghanistan who had been held in custody at that location. The petition in question was filed in the case of Ghulam Mohammed vs Don Rumsfeld. At that time, Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense of the United States. Because Gul could not obtain legal counsel or appear in court, he was represented by his "Next Friend," Haji Naqibullah.

 

The petition filed in 2006 named Gul Mohammed as one of many detainees on whose behalf a petition of habeas corpus was being sought. Habeas corpus is a petition requesting that someone being held unfairly be brought forth into the court system to have a judge hear the charges against them. When the invasion of Afghanistan began in 2003, the United States government began detaining citizens at Bagram Air Base without charges.

 

Though the Geneva Convention requires that prisoners of war appear before a tribunal to determine their status, the Bush administration pursued a legal strategy stating that detainees at Bagram Air Base were "unlawful enemy combatants" who therefore did not have the same rights as prisoners of war. Other cases which appeared contesting similar issues included the 2004 case Rasul v. Bush, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the court system had authority to rule on whether prisoners were wrongfully detained. Another important case that year was Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in which a petition for habeas corpus which had been overturned was reversed by the Supreme Court. The outcome of the case in which Gul Mohammed is unknown. 

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