NJ Muslims win settlement with NYPD

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On Thursday, a group of Muslim-owned businesses, mosques, individuals, and student groups announced that we finalized a settlement agreement with the New York Police Department (NYPD) in Hassan v. City of New York, a federal lawsuit challenging the suspicionless, discriminatory surveillance of American Muslims in New Jersey. Together with Muslim Adv;ocates and the law firm of Gibbons P.C., we've been representing our brave clients since 2012.

As a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning reports by the AP revealed, under the surveillance program, the NYPD spied on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools, and two Muslim Student Associations in New Jersey. The monitoring included video surveillance, photographing license plates, community mapping, and infiltration by undercover officers and informants at places of worship, student associations, and businesses. Internal NYPD documents revealed that the NYPD used racial and ethnic backgrounds as proxies to identify and target adherents to Islam. By its own admission, the NYPD's surveillance of Muslims failed to produce a single lead.

As CCR's Omar Farah said, "The Hassan settlement exemplifies the power of coordinated legal action and community mobilization, and it cautions law enforcement everywhere to abandon identity-based policing in all its forms. Attempting to predict criminality on the basis of race or religion is repugnant and it never works – except to humiliate and criminalize targeted communities. We are deeply indebted to the Hassan plaintiffs and the Muslim communities behind the Raza and Handschu cases for picking up the mantle in the fight for equality under the law; the reforms and accountability the settlements produced will outlast this moment of virulent, White House–sponsored racism, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim bigotry."

Please check out this powerful new video about the case!

Jury awards indigenous people $10 million win against former president of Bolivia and his former defense minister for 2003 massacre

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In a landmark decision last Wednesday, a federal jury in Ft. Lauderdale found the former president of Bolivia and his minister of defense responsible for extrajudicial killings carried out by the Bolivian military, which killed more than 50 of its own citizens and injured hundreds in September and October 2003. The decision comes after a ten-year legal battle spearheaded by family members of eight people killed in what is known in Bolivia as the "Gas War." It marked the first time in history a former head of state has sat before his accusers in a U.S. human rights trial. The jury awarded a total of $10 million to the plaintiffs.

Both the former Bolivian president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and his former defense minister, José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, have lived in the United States since they fled Bolivia following the massacre in 2003.

"After many years of fighting for justice for our family members and the people of Bolivia, we celebrate this historic victory," said Teófilo Baltazar Cerro, a plaintiff and member of the indigenous Aymara community of Bolivia, who were victims of the defendants' decision to use massive military force against the population. "Fifteen years after they fled justice, we have finally held Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín to account for the massacre they unleashed against our people."

The three-week trial included the testimony of 29 witnesses from across Bolivia who recounted their experiences of the 2003 killings. Twenty-three appeared in person. Eight plaintiffs testified about the deaths of their family members, including: Etelvina Ramos Mamani and Eloy Rojas Mamani, whose eight-year-old daughter Marlene was killed in front of her mother when a single shot was fired through the window; Teófilo Baltazar Cerro, whose pregnant wife Teodosia was killed after a bullet was fired through the wall of a house; Felicidad Rosa Huanca Quispe, whose 69-year-old father Raul was shot and killed along a roadside; and Gonzalo Mamani Aguilar, whose father Arturo was shot and killed while tending his crops. One witness, a former soldier in the Bolivian military, testified about being ordered to shoot at "anything that moves" in a civilian community, while another recounted witnessing a military officer kill a soldier for refusing to follow orders to shoot at unarmed civilians. Witnesses recounted how tanks rolled through in the streets and soldiers shot for hours on end. Others testified about how the president and minister of defense committed to a military option instead of pursuing dialogue with community leaders to reach a peaceful resolution.

The legal team included Center for Constitutional Rights cooperating attorneys Judith Chomsky and Beth Stevens, Thomas Becker, Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, and the law firms of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Schonbrun, Seplow, Harris & Hoffman, LLP, and Akerman LLP. Lawyers from the Center for Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia) were cooperating attorneys. But above all, it is the bravery and perseverance of the plaintiffs that is responsible for this historic victory for justice.