The Fifth Amendment to the US constitution states: "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law." The Universal Declaration of Human Rights reaffirmed the "right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal."

The Geneva Conventions, relating to Prisoners of War, prohibit "the passing of sentences and carrying out of executions without judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilized societies."

The Bush administration was perfectly aware of all this before the start of its so-called war on terror. In order to circumvent the due process of law, it built a strategy which was based on two premises that in the war on terror the president had unlimited powers to take any decisions and that the terrorist suspects had no rights under the US legal system and the international law.

The objective was to place the terrorist suspects in a legal limbo so that they were completely at the mercy of the US administration -- it could do whatever it wanted to do with them. In order to deprive the prisoners of their legal rights under the US constitution, it set up prison camps which were not on American soil but in Cuba and other secret places on foreign soil.

To deny them the protection of the Geneva Conventions, they were branded as "unlawful enemy combatants" and not as prisoners of war. The president's executive order of February 7, 2002 clearly stated that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda or Taliban detainees.

On June 29,2006 the Supreme Court ruled that President Bush's special military tribunals -- which merely gave the appearance of being fair judicial courts but in reality had very significant limitations -- to try these so-called "enemy combatants" were illegal because no congressional approval had been sought before they were established and because they were not in accordance with the standards set by US laws and the Geneva Conventions.

In passing this sentence, the court tried to reaffirm three fundamental principles. First, the president was not above the law; second, the legislature was not there merely to rubber-stamp the president's decisions but also to control the executive power; and third, in pursuing its war on terror, the United States was bound by the rules of international law such as the Geneva Conventions.

No doubt the Supreme Court ruling is a step in the right direction but it is a modest one. Human rights activists should not start jumping with joy because there are considerable doubts about the exact consequences of the ruling. On July 11, the Bush administration asked "the Congress to fix, rather than scrap the system of military tribunals struck down by the Supreme Court."

However, on the same day, the Pentagon stated that in compliance with Article 3 of the Geneva conventions, the prisoners at Guantanamo prison camp will be treated humanely. But according to some analysts there is still considerable scepticism as to whether Pentagon will fully comply with the other requirement of Article 3 of the Geneva conventions of 1949 which prohibits "the passing of sentences and carrying out of executions without judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees."

I am in agreement with the Economist's comments on the court ruling. It wrote, the Supreme Court "blocked the executive from doing what was clearly unlawful, but otherwise sought to interfere as little as possible."

The writer is a Daily Star columnist.