Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 22, 1993 TAG: 9306220148
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
That policy was carried over from the Bush administration but stiffened by President Clinton with a floating naval blockade that at one point had 22 U.S. vessels ringing the Caribbean nation. A few Coast Guard vessels remain there.
The Reagan administration had pursued a less restrictive ban on the "boat people," allowing political refugees to make a claim for asylum before being sent back.
The court's new decision, reached with only Justice Harry Blackmun dissenting, appears to give Clinton - and future presidents - almost unlimited authority to send vessels out onto the high seas hundreds of miles from America to stop anyone believed to be headed to U.S. shores without the government's permission.
The president had promised last year, as a candidate, that he would end the policy, calling it illegal and "cruel." But, five days before he became president in January, he switched, saying the forced-return order would continue as a "policy for this moment" to head off a potential new wave of potentially life-threatening voyages by refugees.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the decision, stressed that the court was not passing judgment upon "the wisdom of the policy choices made by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton." Stevens also conceded that the legal challenges to the policy had "moral weight," but went on to conclude that the policy was entirely legal.
The court's opinion said that the forced repatriation of "fleeing refugees . . . to the one country they had desperately sought to escape" does not violate any legal duty the U.S. government has under a 1967 United Nations treaty that the U.S. signed in 1968.
The opinion did suggest, though, that "such actions may . . . violate the spirit" of that treaty.
by CNB