Muslim groups win right to pursue civil rights abuse lawsuit against New York Police Deparment

A coalition of Muslim groups has been told it can pursue a civil rights lawsuit that accuses New York City police of conducting secret surveillance of Muslims without suspicion of criminal activity.

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the groups can make the claim that the counter-terrorism programme violated their rights. The decision by the court in Philadelphia reversed a lower court’s decision to throw out the case.

“We have learned from experience that it is often where the asserted interest appears most compelling that we must be most vigilant in protecting constitutional rights,” Circuit Judge Thomas Ambro wrote for a three-judge panel, according to Reuters.

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The anti-terror programme, which was carried out in the state of New Jersey, became widely known after a series of articles by the Associated Press, which reported that police officers were infiltrating Muslim organisations throughout the greater New York region in the wake of the attacks of September 11 2001.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who criticised the effort on the campaign trail, ended the programme after taking office in 2014.

The plaintiffs in the case, including New Jersey imams, business owners and students, sued New York in 2012, claiming the surveillance subjected them to discrimination, threatened their careers and caused them to stop attending religious services.

But Judge William Martini in Newark, New Jersey, dismissed the case in February 2014, finding the city had persuasively argued that the surveillance was an anti-terrorism, not an anti-Muslim, programme. The appeals court decision does not resolve the merits of the case but returns the lawsuit to Mr Martini for further proceedings.

“There is no Muslim exception to the Constitution,” said Baher Azmy, legal director for the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents the plaintiffs along with Muslim Advocates.

The case is one of several lawsuits filed against New York over the programme; the New York Civil Liberties Union brought a similar claim in Brooklyn federal court in 2013.

In addition, a group of civil rights lawyers filed papers in Manhattan federal court, claiming the surveillance runs afoul of a longstanding court order limiting how the police can monitor political activity.