Vol. 79/No. 39      November 2, 2015

The lawsuit, Hassan v. City of New York, was filed in 2012 on behalf of 11 Muslim groups and individuals by Muslim Advocates and the Center for Constitutional Rights. The plaintiffs demanded that New York cops’ spying program be declared unconstitutional and halted, that the NYPD be ordered to destroy all records gathered through this operation and provide financial compensation.

The appeal was backed by legal briefs filed on behalf of dozens of other religious and political groups, including the National Council of the Churches of Christ and the Union for Reform Judaism. The appeals court said that the issues before it were straightforward to resolve in favor of the plaintiffs. “Lurking beneath the surface, however, are questions about equality, religious liberty, the role of courts in safeguarding our Constitution, and the protection of our civil liberties and rights equally during wartime and peace,” the judges wrote.

“We have been down similar roads before,” the court said. “Jewish-Americans during the Red Scare, African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, and Japanese-Americans during World War II are examples that readily spring to mind.”

Facts about the cops’ surveillance, which had been going on for nearly a decade, became public when a series of Associated Press articles in 2011 released secret police documents detailing NYPD spying on Muslim mosques, schools, restaurants, stores and other locations in New Jersey and New York. Informants were also placed in Muslim Student Association groups.

City officials and cops claimed the invasive spy program was justified to prevent terrorist attacks. “American Muslims cannot be treated like second-class citizens by police because of their faith,” Muslim Advocates Legal Director Glenn Katon said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing our case to ensure that no American should be spied on simply because of the way he or she prays.”

The appeals court ruling “is tremendously significant for our plaintiffs,” said Omar Farah, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a phone interview Oct. 19. “It reaffirmed that the NYPD was terribly wrong in singling out the Muslim community for discriminatory policing.”

The “ruling paves the path to holding the NYPD accountable for ripping up the Constitution. Enough is enough,” lead plaintiff Farhaj Hassan, a soldier in the U.S. Army, told the Muslim Advocates.

In June, the cops agreed to a settlement in a similar lawsuit filed in 2013 by Muslim mosques and individuals in New York City. That suit, argued by the American Civil Liberties Union and the NYCLU, demanded an end to NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program and a bar to future spying based on religious affiliation.  
 
 
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