A federal appeals court in Philadelphia on Tuesday reinstated a civil rights lawsuit over the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims, ruling that claims of public safety and national security motives did not justify discriminatory scrutiny.
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“We have been down similar roads before”, he declared, quoting arguments used to argue against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
“There is no Muslim exception to the Constitution”, said Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the plaintiffs along with Muslim Advocates.
“I’m very happy we will get our day in court”, said plaintiff Farhaj Hassan.
A spokesman for the Law Department said the city is reviewing the decision.
The New York Police Department referred questions about the opinion to the law department.
The NYPD has insisted that its program, which was shut down a year ago, was merely meant to stay on guard for possible terror threats.
The appeals court decision does not resolve the merits of the case but returns the lawsuit to Mr Martini for further proceedings. The district court also found that any harm to the communities that have been spied on was not caused by the unlawful surveillance program itself, but by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting by the Associated Press that exposed it.
Under the NYPD’s program, the AP reported, the NYPD spied on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools, and two Muslim Student Associations in New Jersey alone.
Because the lawsuit did not claim any harm before the Associated Press began publishing stories about the program, it meant that any issues came “from the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents”, Martini wrote. “We hope that this decision reverberates not just throughout the country but throughout the federal government as well, which we know is still conducting all types of surveillance based on religion and ethnicity”. A trial court dismissed the suit, finding the plaintiffs’ lacked standing and that the city was seeking to “locate budding terrorist conspiracies”, not to discriminate. Police allegedly monitored suspects by taking photographs and videos at mosques, Muslim schools and businesses and also sent undercover officers to pick up information.
Ambro and the panel did not seem swayed by this suggestion.
“We must apply the same rigorous standards even where national security is at stake”, he wrote.
What occurs here in one guise is not new.
“We have learned from experience that it is often where the asserted interest appears most compelling that we must be most vigilant in protecting constitutional rights”, Reuters quoted Circuit Judge Thomas Ambro as saying for a three-judge panel, reminding his audience of the USA internment of Japanese-Americans.
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Caption: People walk past immigrant Arab businesses on Steinway Street in the Astoria neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York, September 2, 2011.
