Factual returns are documents a government has to file in response to

habeas corpus ''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, t ...

petitions. Habeas corpus is a legal tool in the English tradition of justice, dating back to ''

Magna Carta (Medieval Latin for "Great Charter of Freedoms"), commonly called (also ''Magna Charta''; "Great Charter"), is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by the ...

'', prohibiting

arbitrary arrest and detention Arbitrary arrest and arbitrary detention are the arrest or detention of an individual in a case in which there is no likelihood or evidence that they committed a crime against legal statute, or in which there has been no proper due process of law ...

. Captives are entitled to file a writ of habeas corpus before a judge, requiring the state to offer a justification for his or her detention.

Guantanamo factual returns

On 18 November 2008

Gordon R. England Gordon Richard England (born September 15, 1937) is an American politician and businessman who was the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense and twice served as the U.S. Secretary of the Navy in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. ...

, the

Deputy Secretary of Defense The deputy secretary of defense (acronym: DepSecDef) is a statutory office () and the second-highest-ranking official in the Department of Defense of the United States of America. The deputy secretary is the principal civilian deputy to the se ...

file an affidavit in which he attempted to explain why the Bush administration was not complying with the

Supreme Court A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...

's ruling in ''

Boumediene v. Bush ''Boumediene v. Bush'', 553 U.S. 723 (2008), was a writ of ''habeas corpus'' submission made in a civilian court of the United States on behalf of Lakhdar Boumediene, a naturalized citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina, held in military detention by ...

'' that Guantanamo captives were entitled to a prompt review of their status. The factual return is supposed to include the information presented to the captives during their

Combatant Status Review Tribunal The Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) were a set of tribunals for confirming whether detainees held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp had been correctly designated as "enemy combatants". The CSRTs were esta ...

s and their annual

Administrative Review Board The Administrative Review Board is a United States military body that conducts an annual review of the detainees held by the United States in Camp Delta in the United States Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The purpose of the Board is to revi ...

hearings; the classified information that was presented to the officers who reviewed their status, but withheld from the captives, and the underlying information on which the original allegations were based. The officers who sat on the CSR Tribunals and annual Review hearings weren't authorized to challenge the credibility of the allegations presented to them. But the Judicial Branch has insisted on viewing the actual evidence on which the allegations were based. In the fall of 2007, the Department of Justice explained it could not produce the evidence on the allegations used to justify the captives' detention, because it had not preserved that evidence. The

Executive branch The Executive, also referred as the Executive branch or Executive power, is the term commonly used to describe that part of government which enforces the law, and has overall responsibility for the governance of a State (polity), state. In poli ...

was expected to file fifty factual returns per month, starting in August 2008. But by March 2009 only 100 had been filed. The Executive branch was arguing that even the unclassified versions of the returns should be withheld from the public. On June 1, 2009,

Thomas F. Hogan Thomas Francis Hogan (born 1938) is a United States federal judge, Senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who served as director of the Administrative Office of the United States Cour ...

, the Judge coordinating the Guantanamo habeas petitions, ordered that the executive branch had to make the unclassified factual returns public. He ruled that permission to withhold this information had only been temporary, to allow the documents to be checked to see if they contained classified information.

References

{{Reflist Guantanamo Bay captives legal and administrative procedures