In a Supreme Court case involving Uighurs detained at Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration has won the kind of victory the president should presumably relish. Both sides won, in some sense.

In October 2008, U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina had ordered that 17 Uighur detainees be released into the US:

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina issued his ruling in dramatic fashion from the bench in a packed courtroom, saying he was ordering the release of 17 Uighurs because the government provided no proof that they were enemy combatants or security risks. Under the order, the men will live with Uighur families in the Washington area until a more permanent situation can be found.

“Because the Constitution prohibits indefinite detention without cause, the government’s continued detention of the [detainees] is unlawful,” Urbina said. “Because separation-of-powers concerns do not trump the very principle upon which this nation was founded — the unalienable right to liberty — the court orders the government to release the [men] into the United States.”

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overruled this decision in February 2009:

The panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina had erred in ordering the Uighurs’ release into the United States.

Two of the judges, Karen LeCraft Henderson and A. Raymond Randolph, found that Urbina had overstepped his authority in ordering such a remedy. Only the executive branch and Congress have the power to allow people to enter the United States, they said.

“The question here is not whether petitioners should be released, but where,” Randolph wrote, adding that the Supreme Court has long “sustained the exclusive power of the political branches to decide which aliens may, and which aliens may not, enter the United States, and on what terms.”

Lawyers for the Uighurs appealed this decision to the Supreme Court, which was scheduled to hear the case next month. The Obama administration petitioned the court to dismiss the case, due to a material change in circumstances. Judge Urbina’s ruling was based on the fact that no other country was willing to accept the Uighurs, which is no longer true:

“Each of the detainees at issue in this case has received at least one offer of resettlement in another country,” the court said in an unsigned, three-paragraph order. “Most of the detainees have accepted an offer of resettlement; five detainees, however, have rejected two such offers and are still being held at Guantanamo Bay.”

Yesterday, the Supreme Court accepted the Obama administration’s petition and dismissed the case:

The justices, without recorded dissent, agreed with the Obama administration that changed circumstances meant that the challenge, brought by a group of Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, was not ripe for the court’s consideration.

However, the Supreme Court also rejected the Court of Appeals ruling:

At the same time, the justices wiped out a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that had been challenged by attorneys for the detainees. The ruling said that the judicial branch had no power to release into the United States those cleared of being enemy combatants but who cannot be returned to their home countries for fear of persecution.

So it’s happily ever after for everyone, except for the 5 Uighurs who are still being held at Guantanamo. They had turned down previous resettlement offers, perhaps in the hope they would be admitted to the US. Presumably, they will now seek to accept one of the previous offers. One was from “the island nation of Palau”, the second from an “undisclosed country.”