Michael Ratner
Acclaimed human rights critic of Guantanamo Bay detentions
AMAN of courage and political insight, the American human ri g h t s la w y e r Michael Ratner, who has died of cancer, aged 72, dedicated his career to fighting the US government’s detentions at Guantanamo Bay in the wake of 9/11. Five hundred US lawyers helped argue the case over the fate of hundreds of Muslims detained with neither trial nor access to lawyers, and subjected to torture. A legacy of the George W Bush administration,the facility has remained a thorn in the side of President Obama, whose promise to close it down proved futile.
In 2004 Ratner, acting as co-counsel in the US Supreme Court case Rasul v Bush, won a landmark victory for the prisoners’ rights to test the legality of their detentions. Filed in 2002, it was the first lawsuit to challenge President Bush’s wartime detent io n s , bu t had consistently failed o n ap p e a l due to a politically driven administration which preferred to stall the outcome. The 2004 victory represented the first time that the Supreme Court had ruled against the president on behalf of alleged enemy fighters in wartime.
Although Ratner did not live to attain his prime objective — the closure of Guantanamo Bay — he witnessed the release of nearly 800 inmates, aware that powerful advocates are still working to secure the release of the remaining prisoners.
For 40 years Ratner worked at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights founded by the lawyer William Kunstler, becoming its first president and then president emeritus. The CCR represented the civil rights movement in the southern states, and made it the focus for lawyers representing unknown prisoners from some 12 countries in their attempt to close Guantanamo.
The organisation helped defend people rendered for torture in Syria, or murdered, and it represented their families in a battle to overturn what it described as the perversion of justice.
It was a commitment that flew in the face of President Obama’s unfulfilled promise to close down Guantanamo. Sadly, Ratner, who was president of the National Lawyers Guild, saw colleagues abandon their common search for justice and the upholding of the Constitution, to defend Obama’s drone policy. Yet he won countless human rights and legal prizes for his work on Guantanamo, earning the respect of friends from around the world. His name was a focus for like-minded lawyers and journalists who pledged to uphold the constitution and clarify legal complexities.
Ratner hailed from a Jewish-Russian immigrant family well aware of human rights issues. Born in Ohio, Cleveland to businessman Harry Ratner and his wife Anne (née Spott), who had helped re-settle refugees from the Second World War, he opted to study archaeology, but in fact chose mediaeval English at Brandeis University where he graduated in 1966. From there he studied law at Columbia University, New York, and became an active opponent of the Vietnam War.
He was drawn to social activism and the CCR while a teacher at Yale and Columbia law schools. First it was American civil rights, then the US blockade of Castro’s Cuba and American intervention in Central America. Through four decades he challenged what he saw as America’s imperialist wars, including the Iraq war, as well as class injustice and social discrimination in all its forms.
Well before his battle against Guantanamo Bay, he was active in various struggles in Central America, and condemned torture used by CIA inquisitors.
As a measure of his political courage he condemned the Clinton administration for justifying its 1999 war by demonising the Yugoslav and Serb leadership. Ratner was perhaps less noted for his battle for Palestinian rights. As a Jewish civil rights campaigner he was not afraid to condemn Israel for what he termed its violation of international law and recently helped found Palestinian Legal, designed to defend the Palestnians’ right to protest. He said: “Get- ting to know Palestinians was very important on my adventure.”
A man well versed in challenges, Ratner saw many of these battles take place on university campuses. In fact the reason he left the board of his alma mater, Brandeis University, was because it suspended ties to the Palestinian Al Quds University.
As chair of the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) he challenged both the Bush and Obama administrations on behalf of high profile human rights cases in Europe. These were based on the principle of universal jurisdiction, charging US officials with wars, torture, extraordinary rendition and killings by drones, in 2006.
The ECCHR condemned US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others for abuse at Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison and also sued the private military contractors involved.
Ratner took on the world’s giants to represent the interests of the weakest. Recently he represented technology’s newest political issues: whistleblowing. Haunted by the suicide of 26-yearold Aaron Swartz, who faced 30 years in jail for hacking into a digital academic library, he and a team of international lawyers represented Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in the right to expose abuses and ensure access to information, while Assange himself remains holed up in London’s Ecuadorean embassy.
Rabbi Michael Lerner described Ratner as “a one-man force multiplier” and “the champion of the oppressed,” adding that he was “perhaps one of the most influential Jewish sons in the realm of human and civil rights in the last two decades in North America.”
Despite his principled commitment as a lawyer, it was the court of public opinion that mattered most to Ratner. He hosted radio shows, addressed conferences and wrote several books, including The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book: Against War in Iraq and Guantanamo: What the World Should Know.
Michael Ratner is survived by his second wife Karen Ranucci and their children Jake and Ana, as well as by his brother Bruce and sister Ellen.
His first marriage to Margaret Kunstler ended in divorce.
Four decades of political activism — against torture, rendition and imperialist wars