464, 485–86, 102 S.Ct. 752, 70 L.Ed.2d 700 (1982), the members of the Coalition:
fail to identity any personal injury suffered by them as a consequence of the alleged constitutional error, other than the psychological consequence presumably produced by observation of conduct with which one disagrees. That is not an injury sufficient to confer standing under Art. III, even though the disagreement is phrased in constitutional terms.
Id. Because neither the Coalition nor any of its members has a relationship with the detainees, it cannot assert third-party standing on their behalf. Absent injury-in-fact and any relationship to the detainees, we find no third-party standing.
- C. Jurisdiction.
Because we conclude that the Coalition lacks standing, we decline to reach the remaining questions addressed by the district court: (1) whether the district court lacked jurisdiction because no custodian is within its territorial jurisdiction; and (2) whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763, 70 S.Ct. 936, 94 L.Ed. 1255 (1950) would preclude any district court from asserting jurisdiction over the petition.[1] We therefore vacate those portions of the district court’s opinion which reached those questions.
Reaching either question, in particular the applicability of Johnson, is inappropriate. Such determinations purport to adjudicate the habeas rights of individual detainees, when the Coalition itself lacks standing to bring the petition and they were not before the court. The Supreme Court has stated that federal courts must hesitate before resolving a controversy, even one within their constitutional power to resolve, on the basis of the rights of third persons not parties to the litigation. Singleton, 428 U.S. at 113–14, 96 S.Ct. 2868. Such a concern cuts to the heart of the case-and-controversy requirement of Article III. Courts should not adjudicate rights unnecessarily; the real parties in interest in an adversarial system are usually the best proponents of their own rights. Id. Well-established principles of judicial restraint favor resolving this appeal on the narrow standing ground. The Supreme Court has warned, where litigants lack standing, that “[f]or a court to pronounce upon the meaning or the constitutionality of a state or federal law when it has no jurisdiction to do so is, by very definition, for a court to act ultra vires.” Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env’t, 523 U.S. 83, 101–02, 118 S.Ct. 1003, 140 L.Ed.2d 210 (1998).
III. Conclusion
The question before us is not the scope of the rights and privileges of the detainees themselves under either our Constitution or other international laws or agree-
- ↑ There is no question that the holding in Johnson represents a formidable obstacle to the rights of the detainees at Camp X-Ray to the writ of habeas corpus; it is impossible to ignore, as the case well matches the extraordinary circumstances here. After Germany had surrendered in World War II, German spies were captured by allied forces in China. They were tried and convicted by a military tribunal, imprisoned in Germany and sought a writ of habeas corpus in the United States federal courts. Johnson, 339 U.S. at 766, 70 S.Ct. 936. The German spies were thus enemy aliens who were captured and tried abroad, and imprisoned there by the United States military. The Supreme Court held that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus could not be extended to aliens held outside the sovereign territory of the United States. Id. at 778, 70 S.Ct. 936; see also Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 693, 121 S.Ct. 2491, 150 L.Ed.2d 653 (2001) (“It is well established that certain constitutional protections available to persons inside the United States are unavailable to aliens outside of our geographic borders.”).
