Constitutional problems of counterterrorism since 2001: A socio-legal analysis of detention at Guantánamo

Journal title SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO
Author/s Domenico Tosini
Publishing Year 2016 Issue 2016/1 Language Italian
Pages 23 P. 29-51 File size 219 KB
DOI 10.3280/SD2016-001002
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The article examines several of the most significant problems found in the field of counterterrorism since 2001, considering a case study of the measures adopted in the Guantánamo prison camp. Legal thinking and modern states’ legal orders are known to have tried to identify criteria and institutional models capable of ensuring compatibility between the use of extraordinary powers focused on tackling threats and calamities and their conformity with the principles and constitutional norms on which those same legal orders are founded. The counterterrorism set in motion by the 11 September attacks and other comparable events, such as the suicide attacks in London in 2005, focuses attention on the precarious nature of this compatibility. This has been principally evident in the manner in which use has been made of preventive detention: in particular in the case of detention in the camp in Cuba. Despite a series of Supreme Court rulings about detention in Guantánamo, whose purpose was to curb the spread of the powers wielded by the executive, an investigation of the rhetoric used by the Bush administration, of the nature of the measures taken and of the countermeasures adopted to evade the effect of the Supreme Court’s rulings has thrown light on an underlying logic: that of the pressure applied to the entire apparatus of the state for the purpose of subjecting the decisionmaking process about the state of emergency to the primacy of criteria of the efficiency/inefficiency of the measures for preventing threats and safeguarding security, at the expense of their constitutionality/unconstitutionality

Keywords: Antiterrorismo Guantánamo - Libertà civili - Stato d’emergenza - Terrorismo

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Domenico Tosini, Problemi costituzionali dell’antiterrorismo successivo al 2001: un’analisi socio-giuridica della detenzione di Guantánamo in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 1/2016, pp 29-51, DOI: 10.3280/SD2016-001002