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Lawsuit on Behalf of Excluded Scholar
By Rachel B. Levinson
The AAUP has joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in filing suit against the Departments of State and Homeland Security for blocking South African scholar Adam Habib from entering the United States. In October 2006, Habib was intercepted at John F. Kennedy International Airport and denied entry to the United States, where he was scheduled to meet with officers of the Social Science Research Council, Columbia University, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Bank. The State Department subsequently revoked the visas of his wife and their two young children—an unusual act for which no explanation was given. Habib subsequently applied for a new visa, and in October 2007, the State Department denied the application. At the same time, it informed him that it would not give him a “waiver of inadmissibility,” which allows entry to persons deemed inadmissible for statutory reasons, if he were to apply for one. The denial was based on a portion of the USA Patriot Act that excludes aliens who have “engaged in a terrorist activity”; the government did not, however, provide any evidence for its determination that Habib had engaged in terrorist activity or cite a specific section of the Patriot Act defining the type of “terrorist activity” in which Habib supposedly engaged.
The lawsuit contends that censorship at the border prevents U.S. citizens and residents from hearing speech that is protected by the First Amendment. It asks the court to rule that the government’s exclusion of Habib violates the First Amendment and that Habib should not be denied a visa on the basis of protected speech. Because of the lack of evidence, it also asks the court to prohibit the government from relying on the “terrorist activity” language to exclude Habib.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the AAUP and other organizations that have invited Habib to speak in the United States, including the American Sociological Association, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights. Habib has accepted an invitation to speak at the AAUP’s Ninety-fourth Annual Meeting ( June 12–15, 2008) in Washington, D.C. If able to appear, he will discuss academic freedom in South Africa. Habib is deputy vice chancellor of research, innovation, and advancement at the University of Johannesburg.
Over the past few years, numerous foreign scholars, human-rights activists, and writers—many of them vocal critics of U.S. policy—have been barred from the United States without explanation or on unspecified national security grounds. In 2006, the ACLU and the AAUP filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of U.S. academic groups and Tariq Ramadan, a widely respected Swiss scholar of the Muslim world, who remains excluded today.
“Habib’s case is one instance among many of the administration’s overreaching in guarding our borders, and thereby continuing to damage freedom,” says Jonathan Knight, director of the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. The September–October issue of Academe featured many from the growing list of excluded scholars. A report on the same topic was issued by the ACLU in October; it is available on the Web at www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/the_excluded_report.pdf.
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