The American Civil Liberties Union will present arguments before a federal appeals court Tuesday in the case of a Swiss professor and leading scholar of the Muslim world who was denied entry to the United States based on his political views. Professor Tariq Ramadan was invited to teach at the University of Notre Dame in 2004 but the U.S. government revoked his visa, citing a statute that applies to those who have "endorsed or espoused" terrorism. After the ACLU and other organizations filed suit, the government abandoned its claim that Ramadan had endorsed terrorism, but it continues to exclude him because he made small donations to a Swiss charity that the government alleges has given money to Hamas. The ACLU will argue that the government's exclusion of Ramadan was motivated not by anything he did but by his vocal criticism of U.S. foreign policy.
"By denying visas to prominent foreign scholars and writers simply because they were critical of United States foreign policy, the Bush administration used immigration laws to skew and stifle political debate inside the U.S.," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, who will argue the case for the plaintiffs. "While the government has an interest in excluding people who present a threat to the country, it doesn't have any legitimate interest in excluding foreign nationals simply because of their political views. The Bush administration was wrong to revive this Cold War practice, and the Obama administration should not defend it."
The appeal stems from a January 2006 lawsuit challenging Professor Ramadan's exclusion filed by the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and the PEN American Center. A federal judge wrongly upheld the exclusion in December 2007.
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More information about the Ramadan case, the history of ideological exclusion, and the ACLU's separate lawsuit concerning the exclusion of South African scholar Adam Habib is available online at: www.aclu.org/exclusion
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