Freedom's Charter

Some call the Magna Carta democracy’s birth certificate.

On June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, English barons forced King John to agree to terms that came to make up the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta sounded a clarion call for a new age: There will be legal and political accountability for government action.

In November 1297, King Edward I confirmed the most authoritative version of the Magna Carta, which was committed to British law. Only 17 copies of this parchment document survive today.

Yesterday, David Rubenstein, a Washington lawyer and businessman, presented a 711-year-old hand-written copy of the Magna Carta to the National Archives, for a long-term loan.

The Magna Carta made civil liberties for the masses possible. Principles like the right to challenge one’s imprisonment, known as habeas corpus; Freedom of Speech; the rule of law; freedom of worship; the ban on cruel and unusual punishment all came out of this 13th Century artifact forged in a rebellion.

The founders established many of these principles they held dear into law in the Constitution of the United States. Over time, they crafted the Bill of Rights to give the Constitution its teeth. The United States thus became a model of justice for the world.

Many nations seeking to establish constitutional governments – South Africa, for instance, upon emerging from its racist apartheid policies in the early 1990s – modeled their constitutions on the U.S. Constitution.

But six years ago, America veered from the path defined by the Magna Carta’s principals. It was on January 11, 2002, that the first prisoners arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to commence an indefinite detention: cut off from the world, without access to lawyers, sometimes undergoing shocking treatment. Our government’s own records show they have been tortured, abused and debased.

To compound the affront to the Magna Carta, in October 2006, the U.S. eviscerated habeas corpus, when President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act, stripping detainees in U.S. custody from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of the right to fair and impartial trial.

The Bush administration has said the detainees should be kept in these legal black holes overseas because they’re unlawful enemy combatants who should not be granted access to U.S. Courts, and their right of habeas corpus should be denied because they are not on American soil.

As years pass, and these detainees’ rights go ignored inGuantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib, America’s image around the world deteriorates.

The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently rebuked the Bush administration’s extreme theories regarding habeas. “We are heirs to a tradition given voice 800 years ago by Magna Carta, which, on the barons’ insistence, confined executive power by ‘the law of the land,’ ” Justice David Souter declared in his concurring opinion in the landmark 2004 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld ruling.

The Magna Carta is a big deal because it is the document that set the course for the modern age. And in our current predicaments, when wars and fear seem to grip our nation, the ideals it gave rise to have never been more needed.

To learn more about the Magna Carta, read ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero’s detailed history celebrating its birthday last year in HuffingtonPost.