The American Civil Liberties Union has filed an appeal of a 2007 federal-court ruling that the U.S. government acted legally when it denied a visa to Tariq Ramadan, a prominent European Muslim scholar.
The ACLU continues to argue that the visa denial was political. “In Professor Ramadan’s case and many others, the government is using immigration laws to exclude its critics and censor and control the ideas that Americans can hear,” said Jameel Jaffer, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Projects, in a written statement.
The ruling, which was handed down in late December by Judge Paul A. Crotty of the U.S. District Court in New York, upheld a 2004 decision by the State Department to revoke a work visa because Mr. Ramadan had donated money to a group that passed on some of its funds to the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Mr. Ramadan was seeking a visa in order to take a faculty post at the University of Notre Dame.
In his ruling, Judge Crotty emphasized that the courts’ jurisdiction over consular decisions is extremely limited. He also ruled that the State Department and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had not used the USA Patriot Act as a reason to deny Mr. Ramadan a visa — and thus would not rule on that law’s constitutionality.
The original lawsuit was filed in January 2006 by the ACLU on behalf of the American Association of University Professors, Mr. Ramadan, and other plaintiffs. The appeal was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York.