The United States government is heading for the dock. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has launched legal action against it over its denial of a visa to prominent South African academic Adam Habib. And now that the US has revealed its reasons for denying Habib entry to the country, essentially accusing him of ‘terrorist†activity, the backlash against the superpower’s government is intensifying.
Habib, a political scientist who is deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, first ran into the brick wall of US immigration officialdom in October last year when he landed in New York. He had a series of meetings lined up with the National Institute for Health, Columbia University, the Gates Foundation, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Bank.
As the ACLU noted at the time, Habib was detained for seven hours at the airport and ‘interrogated about his associations and political views. Armed guards eventually escorted him to a plane and deported him back to South Africa.â€
Earlier this year Habib again applied for a visa to the US, partly to enable him to address the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August. This time the US state department told him before his departure that his visa application would not be processed in time — despite Habib having made the application in May.
Last month the US government finally wrote to Habib about the matter. Charles Luoma-Overstreet, senior US consul in Johannesburg, told Habib: ‘I regret to inform you that … the department of state has upheld a finding of your inadmissibility under … the United States Immigration and Nationality Act.â€
The letter included a copy of the section of the Act under which Habib had been denied entry. The section is headed ‘Terrorist Activities†and refers to ‘any alien who … has engaged in terrorist activity†or who ‘has, under circumstances indicating an intention to cause death or serious bodily harm, incited terrorist activityâ€.
These two definitions are part of a lengthy list that includes any ‘representative†of ‘a political, social or other similar group whose public endorsement of acts of terrorist activity the secretary of state has determined undermines United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorist activitiesâ€.
The ACLU, which is backing Habib in his battle with US officialdom, was founded in 1920 and now has more than 500 000 members. It receives no government funding and handles more than 6 000 court cases every year in its aim to preserve the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights, such as the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, association and assembly.
In September the organisation filed legal papers in a Massachusetts court, naming Habib and ‘challenging the [US] government’s exclusion of an otherwise admissible foreign scholar from the US to prevent US citizens and residents from hearing a speech that is protected by the First Amendmentâ€.
That action was still pending, Melissa Goodman, an attorney at the ACLU, told the Mail & Guardian this week. ‘The government has provided no factual basis for its accusation that Professor Habib has somehow engaged in terrorist activity … We continue to believe that [he] is being excluded not because of his actions but because of his political views and associations.â€
Habib’s exclusion was part of ‘a larger patternâ€, she said.
‘Since 2001 numerous foreign scholars, human rights activists and writers have been barred from the US without explanation or on unspecified national security grounds under circumstances that suggest the government is excluding these scholars, not for legitimate security reasons, but rather because the government disfavours their views. Ideological exclusion is essentially censorship at the border,†Goodman said.
Habib said when he asked the US officials ‘what the basis was for their allegations of my terrorist activities — namely, what I was deemed to have done — I was told: ‘We don’t enter [into] that specificity of discussion.’ I was both bemused and outraged: it’s obligatory to ‘enter that specificity of discussion’ given those kinds of allegations.†The matter would not rest here, he said.
Sharon Hudson-Dean, press attaché at the US embassy in Pretoria, responded to the M&G’s questions by saying ‘we do not comment on individual visa casesâ€.
Holy terror, Page 24