Verguisd man krijgt toch erkenning

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Is het niet in Rotterdam, dan toch wel in de USA.

Groet / Cees

January 21, 2010
In Shift, U.S. Lifts Visa Curbs on Professor
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/world/europe/21london.html
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON — Six years after using the Patriot Act to revoke the visa of a
prominent Muslim academic, the United States State Department reversed
itself and said Wednesday that it would no longer bar the scholar from
entering the United States.

The decision came in the form of an order signed by Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton. It paves the way for the scholar, Prof. Tariq
Ramadan, to apply for a new visa free of the authorities’ former
accusation that he had contributed money to a charity connected to
terrorism.

“I am very happy and hopeful that I will be able to visit the United
States very soon and to once again engage in an open, critical and
constructive dialogue with American scholars and intellectuals,”
Professor Ramadan said in a statement.

Professor Ramadan, who is Swiss and is a professor of contemporary
Islamic studies at Oxford University, had often visited the United
States and in 2004 planned to travel there to take up a position as a
tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame. But the Bush
administration revoked his visa, and denied him a new one in 2006,
citing a provision of the Patriot Act that allows the barring of
foreigners who “use a position of prominence within any country to
endorse or espouse terrorist activity.”

At first, the government refused to give its reason. But eventually it
pointed to evidence that from 1998 to 2002 Professor Ramadan had donated
about $1,300 to a Swiss-based charity that in turn provided money to
Hamas, the militant Palestinian group. But the professor argued that he
had believed the charity had no connections to terrorist activities or
to Hamas, and said that he had always condemned terrorism.

Professor Ramadan, backed by civil liberties groups and others, has been
fighting the exclusion in the courts. Last summer, a Federal appeals
court in Manhattan reversed a lower-court ruling that had upheld the
government’s decision to deny him a visa, sending the case back to the
lower court for further study.

The State Department’s order also applies to Adam Habib, deputy vice
chancellor at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. Mr. Habib,
who has publicly criticized American foreign policy, was refused
admission to the country in 2006 and has been barred from traveling
there since. A State Department spokesman said that should Professor
Ramadan or Mr. Habib apply for a visa again, “They will not be found
inadmissible on the basis of the facts that led to denials when they
last applied.”

But they might not find a job. Notre Dame said Wednesday that the
position for which it had hired Professor Ramadan had been filled.

Civil rights campaigners have long argued that the two cases were
particularly blatant examples of how the Bush administration used the
Patriot Act as a way to bar people whose political views were at odds
with its own.

“For several years, the United States government was more interested in
stigmatizing and silencing its foreign critics than in engaging them,”
said Jameel Jaffer, director of the National Security Project at the
American Civil Liberties Union. He said the decision showed that the
Obama administration was committed to “facilitating rather than
obstructing the exchange of ideas across international borders.”

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