Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa, North America

RIGHTS-U.N.: Complaint Filed on Behalf of 9/11’s Other Victims

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jan 27 2004 (IPS) - Pakistani Khurram Altaf longs to be reunited with Anza, his nine-year-old, U.S.-born daughter, who remained in New York after the U.S. government arrested and deported her father, like hundreds of other Muslim and Arab immigrants in the wake of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks.

Khurram now is forced to live in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The rest of his family has joined him: his wife Alia and their two children, Fiza, a 10-year-old girl, and Hamza, a five-year-old boy – like Anza, they also are U.S. citizens.

Anza stayed behind in New York to undergo treatment for deafness and is in the care of relatives.

The case of Khurram and 11 other people arrested by the U.S. authorities and never charged with crimes was presented Tuesday by attorneys of the American Civil Liberties Union before a human rights panel of the United Nations.

The ACLU’s official complaint to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention calls on the U.S. government “to maintain its high standards of justice for all despite the threat of terrorism.”

The arrests being challenged by the U.S.-based human rights group occurred in relation to the terrorist attacks in New York (against the World Trade Centre) and Washington (against the U.S. Defence Department) on Sep. 11, 2001.

In the weeks following, the U.S. authorities detained 764 immigrants of Arab or Muslim origin, without charges, with no access to defence lawyers, and in many cases denied contact with their families.

The government acknowledged deporting 478 of those detainees, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said in a press conference Tuesday in Geneva, where the five independent experts of the specialised U.N. human rights working group are in session.

Khurram himself told journalists that he will try to obtain authorisation to return to the United States, where he was a resident for 18 years. He became emotional in speaking to the press, saying he misses Anza, who is living with her grandmother and an uncle.

The Pakistani had entered the United States in 1985, at age 18, with a tourist visa. When he was arrested, Apr. 13, 2002, he was working as a manager at large truck stop in the northeastern state of New Jersey.

He was deported in mid-2002. His wife and two other children joined him a year later.

ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer said that Khurram and the other detainees who are the petitioners in the complaint “were denied fundamental procedural rights recognised under international law.”

“In many cases the government failed to notify detainees of the charges they faced, it refused them access to counsel. Furthermore, the government denied them meaningful judicial review of their confinement,” said Jaffer.

The U.S. government also “categorically opposed detainees’ release on bond and, under a policy known as ‘hold until cleared’,” their detention was prolonged until they were cleared of all connections to terrorism.

In other words, Jaffer said, “the government presumed immigrants guilty and jailed them until it determined that they were innocent.”

Romero accused the George W. Bush administration of seriously undermining the immigrants’ civil liberties in the name of the war against terrorism.

The ACLU filed the complaint with the U.N. body “to ensure that U.S. policies and practises reflect not just domestic constitutional standards, but accepted international human rights principles regarding liberty and its deprivations,” said Romero.

The civil rights organisation wants the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions to issue an opinion that the United States has violated those principles in arresting the immigrants.

The reports drawn up by the working group are not binding, but usually obligate the countries involved to provide explanations and, in most cases, to review their policies, Jaffer told IPS.

Three of the people named in the ACLU complaint remain under detention in the United States: Sadek Awaed, Egyptian, in prison for the past 20 months; Benamar Benatta, Algerian, 28 months; and Anser Mehmood, Pakistani, 23 months.

But the three are not the only ones in the United States who remain behind bars in relation to the events of Sep. 11, said the ACLU attorney.

“The U.S. government gas repeatedly refused to disclose the names of people it detained after Sep. 11 and as a result we don’t know who was arrested, and we don’t know who’s still in jail,” he said.

The government “has used secrecy from the beginning, as a way of insulating its actions from public scrutiny”: the immigrants were arrested in secret and deported in secret, he added.

The document filed with the U.N. states that the immigrant arrests were arbitrary because they were inconsistent with due process and because they were indiscriminate and disproportionately affected Muslims.

“There is evidence that the disproportionate impact of the government’s policies on Muslim men from the Middle East and South Asia was in part a consequence of intentional discrimination,” says the petition.

The ACLU-sponsored complaint is signed by: Ahmad H. Abualeinen (Jordanian, 58 years old), Khaled Raji Said Albitar (Jordanian, 34), Zulfigar Ali (Pakistani, 34), the above-mentioned Khurram Altaf (Pakistani, 36), Sadek Awaed (Egyptian, 32), Benamar Banatta (Algerian, 28), Mohamed Elzaher (Egyptian, 31), Ansar Mahmood (Pakistani, 44), Noor Hussain Raza (Pakistani, 63), Khaled K. Abu-Shabayek (Jordanian, 40) and Naeem Sheikh (Pakistani, 32).