NEW YORK, Dec. 20 — The American Civil Liberties Union issued the following news release:
The American Civil Liberties Union strongly criticized a federal judge’s ruling today that allows the government’s exclusion of renowned Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan from the U.S. The ACLU continues to believe that Ramadan, a leading European academic whose work addresses Muslim identity and the role of Islam in democratic societies, remains banned due to his political viewpoints.
U.S. District Judge Paul A. Crotty of the Southern District of New York ruled that Ramadan could be denied entry into the U.S. based on small donations he made between 1998 and 2002 to a Swiss charity that provides aid to Palestinians. Although the organization operates lawfully in Europe to this day, the Bush administration added the group to a blacklist in 2003 because it allegedly provided "material support" to Hamas. Siding with the executive branch, Judge Crotty ruled that material support laws enacted in 2005 should be applied retroactively to donations made before the Swiss charity was blacklisted by the United States and the material support laws were enacted.
Judge Crotty himself admitted that it was a herculean task for Ramadan to definitively prove he was not aware of the Swiss charity’s alleged ties to Hamas, but he nevertheless required such a showing. He writes, "The [material support] statute imposes a heavy burden: it requires Professor Ramadan to prove a negative, and to do so by clear and convincing proof." In addition, Judge Crotty’s ruling gave extraordinary deference to the government: "Once the consular official has made this decision" to exclude a foreign scholar, he writes, "it is not the Court’s role . . . to second guess the result."
The case is AAR v. Chertoff and is in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
SOURCE : ACLU
