Washington D.C., District Court Judge John Bates ruled Thursday that the federal government could not deny habeas corpus rights to prisoners held at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. The court ruled that the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Boumediene v. Bush in 2008 — which extended habeas corpus rights to prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — also applied to the 600 prisoners held at Bagram. Two Yale Law School students, Amanda Shanor LAW ’09 and Leah Belsky LAW ’09, took part in the oral arguments of the case in early January, where they argued Bates could make a narrow statutory ruling that would avoid constitutional questions.