Public Needs to Speak Up for Freedom, Justice Says

NEW YORK —  Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Thursday that people concerned about losing freedom to government antiterrorism efforts should speak out.

The Supreme Court is taking up several terror-related cases this spring, including challenges to the government detention of terror suspects without legal rights.

Ginsburg, speaking to a group of women’s rights lawyers, was asked if people’s rights were in danger.

“On important issues, like the balance between liberty and security, if the public doesn’t care, then the security side is going to overweigh the other,” she said.

That would change, Ginsburg said, “if people come forward and say we are proud to live in the USA, a land that has been more free, and we want to keep it that way.”

Ginsburg, who argued women’s rights cases at the Supreme Court several decades before former President Clinton named her to the court in 1993, said “an active public” made the difference in the victories of feminism.

Ginsburg, now 70 and one of the more liberal justices, won five of the six Supreme Court cases she argued. She was reunited Thursday with some of the clients she represented during an event held in her honor at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

“She was calling to our attention that work in women’s rights, civil rights is under threat,” said Lisalyn Jacobs, who handles government relations for the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, which co-sponsored the event.

The Bush administration has been criticized by civil libertarians for some of its actions in fighting terrorism, including the detentions of hundreds of foreigners at a military prison in Cuba and some U.S. citizens in America.

They are being held without charges or access to lawyers, something the government maintains is necessary for national security.

In April, the Supreme Court will consider cases involving detainees in Cuba and America.