A federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated a lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslim groups in New Jersey after the September 11 terrorist attacks, saying any resulting harm came from the city’s tactics, not the media’s reporting of them.
Advertisement
The plaintiffs in the case, including New Jersey imams, business owners and students, sued New York in 2012, claiming the surveillance subjected them to discrimination, threatened their careers and caused them to stop attending religious services.
The New Jersey Muslims “have plausibly alleged that the City engaged in intentional discrimination”, Ambro wrote in overturning the ruling, creating “a presumption of unconstitutionality that remains the City’s obligation to rebut…”
During this time, U.S. District Judge William Martini said the surveillance program was “anti-terrorism” not “anti-Muslim”.
A three judge panel rejected the previous findings, comparing the practices to blanket scrutiny of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
“We are reviewing the decision, which sends the case back to the lower court to determine whether the plaintiffs’ allegations are true”, Nick Paolucci, a spokesman for the New York City Law Department, said in a statement.
“The court reaffirmed the elementary principle that law enforcement can not spy on and harass individuals for no other reason than their religion and the equally important principle that courts can not simply accept untested claims about national security to justify a gross stereotype about Muslims”, said Baher Azmy, legal director of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
In 2011, a landmark investigation by the Associated Press revealed that the NYPD’s Intelligence Division had been conducting highly-invasive, suspicion-less surveillance on Muslim-Americans living in and around the New York area.
After becoming mayor, Bill de Blasio ordered the end of the program in 2014. Even when we narrow the many to a class or group, that narrowing-here to those affiliated with a major worldwide religion-is not near enough under our Constitution. In a strongly worded opinion, the court wrote that, “We have been down similar roads before”.
As the Two-Way reported, the NYPD announced past year that it was disbanding the special unit, known as the Demographics Unit, that was formed in 2003 and carried out surveillance of Muslim groups.
A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the groups can make the claim that the counter-terrorism programme violated their rights.
The monitoring included video surveillance of mosques, photographing license plates, community mapping and infiltration by undercover officers and informants of places of worship, student associations as well as businesses.
Hassan was initially filed by Muslim Advocates; the Center for Constitutional Rights and Gibbons, P.C. joined as co-counsel several months later.
Advertisement
“No one should ever be spied on and treated like a suspect simply because of his or her faith”, he said in a statement.
