[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit [official website] on Monday upheld [opinion, PDF] the convictions of three men found guilty of involvement in the 1998 bombing of two US embassies [State Department backgrounder] in Tanzania and Kenya. The court held that Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali, and Wadih El Hage [GlobalSecurity profiles] had received fair trials, and that none of the US government's actions against the men constituted violations of their constitutional rights. In a separate opinion [PDF text] addressing what the judges said was a novel question, the court rejected El Hage's claim that evidence against him obtained through warrantless overseas searches should be excluded, holding that such searches need only be reasonable to satisfy Fourth Amendment [LII backgrounder] requirements:

First, there is nothing in our history or our precedents suggesting that U.S. officials must first obtain a warrant before conducting an overseas search...

Second, nothing in the history of the foreign relations of the United States would require that U.S. officials obtain warrants from foreign magistrates before conducting searches overseas or, indeed, to suppose that all other states have search and investigation rules akin to our own...

Third, if U.S. judicial officers were to issue search warrants intended to have extraterritorial effect, such warrants would have dubious legal significance, if any, in a foreign nation...

Fourth and finally, it is by no means clear that U.S. judicial officers could be authorized to issue warrants for overseas searches, although we need not resolve that issue here.

For these reasons, we hold that the Fourth Amendment’s Warrant Clause has no extraterritorial application and that foreign searches of U.S. citizens conducted by U.S. agents are subject only to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonableness. [citations omitted]