The original content of Democracy Now! Headlines appears under the Creative
Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License (United States). For more, including their other
shows and media, visit www.democracynow.org.
January 14, 2015

Civil Rights Groups Challenge Rejection of Lawsuit Against NYPD's Muslim Surveillance 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


 
A federal appeals court has heard from civil rights groups seeking to
reinstate a lawsuit against the New York City Police Department over its
secret surveillance of Muslims and Arabs in the neighboring state of New
Jersey. District Judge William Martini dismissed the lawsuit in
February, saying the program's main harm came not from the anti-Muslim
surveillance itself, but from the Associated Press' exposure of it.
Speaking outside the appellate court in Philadelphia, attorney Baher
Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights said the surveillance was
unconstitutional because it focused on religion, nationality and race.

Baher Azmy: "The police have tools to deal with law enforcement
problems, but they can't rely on race or religion or — or to
assume that people who are more religious are more dangerous, which is
what undergirds the entirety of the NYPD's program. Religious profiling
is just as illegal as racial profiling. And at the Center for
Constitutional Rights, we fought against racial profiling and challenged
and defeated the city's unconstitutional stop-and-frisk practices, and
we aim to do the same here with respect to the city's unconstitutional
Muslim spying practices."

 

.