WASHINGTON, June 29: In a major rebuke to the Bush administration, the US Supreme Court agreed on Friday to entertain pleas from Guantanamo Bay prisoners who want to challenge their detentions in federal courts.

In April, the court had rejected similar pleas by Guantanamo prisoners, saying that the detainees could not challenge their indefinite confinement in US courts.

It is the first time in recent memory that the court has reversed itself and agreed to hear a case that it had earlier rejected. Many of the 380 Guantanamo inmates are in their sixth year of captivity without charges.

The court will hear their cases in its next term, which begins in October.

Friday’s decision also rejects the Bush administration’s argument that a 2006 law validly bars federal judges from considering so-called habeas corpus petitions filed by prisoners at the US naval base in Cuba.

Opposition Democrats, who now control both chambers of the US Congress, have already moved a piece of legislation which would restore the detainees’ right to file habeas petitions.

The court did not indicate what changed the justices’ minds about considering the issue. But last week, lawyers for the detainees filed a statement from a military lawyer in which he described the inadequacy of the process the administration has put forward as an alternative to a full-blown review by civilian courts.

“Hundreds of men are currently facing lifelong imprisonment without any assurance that they will ever be tried on a criminal charge or given any fair opportunity to challenge the purported basis of their apprehension and detention by the government,” said an appeal filed on behalf of the prisoners.