A federal court in Boston ruled last week that it has the power to review whether the Bush administration has a valid reason for denying a visa to the South African political scientist Adam Habib, a civil-rights activist and scholar of democracy and governance.
The ruling overcomes a significant hurdle for the lawsuit, which argues that the State Department must provide a specific rationale for denying Mr. Habib’s application for a visa last year. That denial was made by the U.S. consular office in South Africa, which cited a statute that makes an applicant who “has engaged in a terrorist activity” ineligible for a visa but gave no further explanation.
Normally, consular decisions are not subject to review by the judicial branch. But the law allows the U.S. attorney general to waive ineligibility rulings, if recommended by the State Department, and the department declined to recommend a waiver for Mr. Habib.
The plaintiffs in the case argue that the department barred Mr. Habib because of his political beliefs, thus violating their First Amendment rights to hear him speak and to debate with him in the United States.
The plaintiffs include the American Association of University Professors and the American Sociological Association, among others. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of those associations and Mr. Habib, who was included in the litigation as a “symbolic plaintiff.”
In the ruling, Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Boston said that the court could consider the case based on the First Amendment claim. Lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the ruling as a victory in a struggle against Bush-administration policies that have excluded a number of foreign scholars from entering the United States.
Mr. Habib, who has been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq and other U.S. policies, was deported upon arrival at a New York airport in 2006, without being given a specific reason. When he applied for a new visa last year, Mr. Habib received a letter from the U.S. government saying his application was denied for having “engaged in terrorist activities.”
Mr. Habib is now a political scientist and a senior administrator overseeing research, innovation, and advancement at the University of Johannesburg, in South Africa. He has denied any involvement in terrorist activities, saying it is “utterly absurd that anyone would associate me with terrorism.”
The U.S. government will now need to convince the District Court that it had a valid reason for the visa denial. Ms. Goodman, the ACLU lawyer, said prior cases suggested the government would need to cite concrete evidence that a specific U.S. statute had been violated.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 55, Issue 17, Page A21