WASHINGTON, Feb 20: The US federal appeals panel on Tuesday stripped Guantánamo Bay captives of the right to challenge their detention in lower federal courts.

The 2-1 judgement is seen as a major legal victory for the Bush administration and upholds an act by the previous Republican-controlled Congress which prevented the prisoners from seeking legal redress against their detention.

The verdict, by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, comes at a time when the Bush administration is preparing to hold war-crimes trials for at least three prisoners held at the US Navy base in Guantánamo, Cuba.

It also sets the stage for an early decision on whether to intervene by the US Supreme Court, which has twice before sided with the detainees.

A Pakistani national is among three captives who are asking the justices to consider their unlawful detention lawsuits. The other two are from Yemen and the Uighur region of China. The three have never been charged with crimes although they have already spent five years each in the US prison facility.

“Federal courts have no jurisdiction in these cases,” declared Judge A. Raymond Randolph for himself and Judge David B. Sentelle. Two successive acts of Congress, they said, had sufficiently stripped detainees of traditional recourse to the writ of habeas corpus.

''The arguments are creative but not cogent. To accept them would be to defy the will of Congress,'' judge Randolph wrote for the two men, who were appointed to the court by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

Judge Judith W. Rogers, a Clinton appointee, dissented, saying the Pentagon had failed to create a fair substitute outside the federal courts at which captives held without charge can challenge their detention.

“While judgements of military necessity are entitled to deference by the courts and while temporary custody during wartime may be justified in order properly to process those who have been captured,” she said, “the executive has had ample opportunity during the past five years during which the detainees have been held at Guantánamo Bay to determine who is being held and for what reason.”

The Republican-led Congress twice passed legislation that removed so-called “enemy combatants” of their right to challenge their detention in US civilian courts -- the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The US Defence Department, which holds 395 enemy combatants without charge at Guantánamo, has declared its power to detain them for the duration of the war on terrorism.

The court ruled even as the Democratic-led Congress considers new legislation to restore the civilian courts' jurisdiction in such cases and to more narrowly define an enemy combatant.