| Michael Ratner | |
| Birth Date: | 13 June 1943 |
| Birth Place: | Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. |
| Death Place: | New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Relatives: | Ellen Ratner (sister) Bruce Ratner (brother) Max Ratner (uncle) |
| Education: | Brandeis University (BA) Columbia University (JD) |
Michael Ratner (June 13, 1943 – May 11, 2016) was an American attorney. For much of his career, he was president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit human rights litigation organization based in New York City, and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) based in Berlin.
Ratner is best known for filing Rasul v. Bush, challenging President wartime detentions under George W. Bush.[1] He was co-counsel in representing the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United States Supreme Court, which ruled for the detainees' right to test the legality of their detentions in US courts, saying that the Guantanamo base was effectively an extension of US territory and covered by US law.[2]
Ratner was a president of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the author of numerous books and articles, including the books The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book, Against War with Iraq, and Guantanamo: What the World Should Know, as well as a textbook on international human rights. Ratner was the co-host of the radio program, Law and Disorder. He and three other attorneys hosted a Pacifica Radio show that reported legal developments related to civil liberties, civil rights, and human rights.
Ratner was the brother of Ellen Ratner, a radio talk show host and Fox News contributor, and Bruce Ratner, a real estate developer and former New Jersey Nets majority owner. He graduated from Brandeis University on 1966. He received his law degree from Columbia Law School, where he graduated first in his class.
Ratner taught law in the early 1970s at Columbia Law School and at Yale Law School.
Ratner opposed Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse and the Iraq War. In January 2006, he served as an expert witness at a mock tribunal staged by the Bush Crimes Commission at Columbia University.
At the end of his life, Ratner was active defending Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, as well as speaking out on behalf of Jeremy Hammond and Chelsea Manning, alleged WikiLeaks sources.[3]
In June 2013, Ratner and numerous other celebrities appeared in a video supporting Chelsea Manning, who was facing court-martial for disclosing files to WikiLeaks that included evidence of war crimes in Iraq.[4] [5]
In May 2014, Michael Ratner submitted his resignation from the advisory board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis, due to the university's president cutting ties with Al Quds, a Palestinian University, after a student demonstration there. Ratner declared his support for Al Quds' President, Dr Nusseibeh, and his promotion of "mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and the exchange of ideas" with Israelis.[6]
Shortly after the US government began to detain prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba in 2002 during the so-called War on Terror, claiming they were beyond the reach of United States law as being "offshore" and military prisoners, Ratner was co-counsel with other attorneys and the CCR in a landmark case challenging the Bush position in court. They filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of British men Shafik Rasul and Asif Iqbal, and Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, saying it was unlawful to hold the men indefinitely without determining their status. They lost in the lower courts, but in November 2003, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. These men were being held with no charges being brought against them. The administration had said US courts had no jurisdiction over them, but the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in Rasul v. Bush (2004) that the detainees had habeas corpus rights as Guantanamo base was effectively an extension of US territory.[7]
This meant the detainees could be represented by counsel, and the CCR was among the groups that worked to obtain legal representation for each of the men. This led to hundreds of men being released after court challenges.[8]
In 2007, Ratner filed a complaint in the courts of France requesting the criminal prosecution of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other US officials for the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.[9]
Ratner served as a special counsel to Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, assisting in the prosecution of human rights crimes.[10]
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which Ratner led, states that its mission is to defend civil liberties in the US. The group's efforts have included a legal challenge to the USA PATRIOT Act and a lawsuit on behalf of post-9/11 immigration detainees in the US.[11] The center also represented Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was "rendered", to Syria, where he was tortured. . Ratner and his office have also sued two private military companies working as part of the occupation of Iraq, alleging their employees were involved in the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse.
In September 2021, The New York Review of Books published an essay[12] by Yale Law School professor and historian Samuel Moyn adapted by the author from his book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021).[13] Tragically, writes Moyn, Ratner's career is a case history of how U.S. humanitarians ended up sanitizing the war on terror instead of opposing it. "By legalizing the manner of the conflict," Moyn asserts, "Ratner paradoxically laundered the inhumanity from what began as a brutal enterprise by helping to recodify a war that thus became endless, legal, and humane."
One week later, The New York Review of Books published a rebuttal by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, who objected that "Reducing Ratner's lifework to an effort to sanitize war and therefore unwittingly enable its continuation is not only a betrayal of his memory; it is also a misplaced attack on the decades of efforts of the human rights movement to curb the barbarity of war and protect civilians caught in its midst.".[14] Another essay, by Ratner's colleagues Joseph Margulies and Baher Azmy, terms Moyn's essay "fantastically wrong", charging it with fundamentally misrepresenting Ratner's activities and views, as well as the broader consequences of his litigation.[15]
Ratner was born into a large Jewish family of immigrants which had fled antisemitism in Poland.[16] Both of his parents, Harry Ratner and Ann Spott, spoke Yiddish at home and were religiously observant, while Ratner was not.[17]
Ratner was married to Karen Ranucci.[18] He died on May 11, 2016. According to The New York Times, citing his brother, Bruce Ratner, the cause of death was complications from cancer.[19] Ratner was ex-husband of lawyer Margaret Ratner Kunstler.
Ratner was the President of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. His service on the boards of non-profits included The Culture Project, The Brandeis Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life, and The Real News (TRNN).