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============================================================= 1. Government "Disappears" NY Palestinian Activist to Atlanta 2. CCR Press Release: Judge Orders Palestinian Released ============================================================= 1. Government "Disappears" NY Palestinian Activist to Atlanta A federal judge ordered the government to release him, but instead the US has moved well-known New York-based Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia--more than 800 miles from his family, friends and legal team--and is holding him there virtually incommunicado. On Thursday, April 8, US district judge Yvette Kane gave the government 10 days to release Abdel-Muhti, a stateless Palestinian national whom immigration authorities have held in prison for nearly two years while they claimed to be arranging his deportation. Judge Kane agreed with his lawyers' argument that Abdel-Muhti must be released since he cannot be returned to his native West Bank in the reasonably foreseeable future. Three days before Kane issued her decision, Abdel-Muhti's supporters and lawyers suddenly lost contact with him. It wasn't until the afternoon of Friday, April 9, that Abdel-Muhti was finally allowed to make one five-minute phone call; he told his support committee he had been flown to Atlanta on Monday, April 5. Abdel-Muhti was housed in the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey, from December 2003 until late March. On March 11, Judge Kane issued an order for him to be moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for a March 30 hearing on his ultimately successful habeas corpus petition. The authorities were ordered "at the conclusion of said proceeding... to immediately return the said Farouk Abdel-Muhti to Hudson County Jail." Instead, the government kept Abdel-Muhti in Dauphin County Prison in Harrisburg until April 5. County authorities then turned him over to the US Marshals Service, which flew him to Atlanta. Abdel-Muhti's attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights are working to have him returned at once to New Jersey in preparation for his release. Abdel-Muhti was a prominent spokesperson for Palestinian rights in New York until immigration authorities seized him on April 26, 2002, one month after he began arranging live interviews with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories for the local Pacifica station, WBAI-FM. Supporters see Abdel-Muhti's current "disappearance" as part of a pattern of harassment. In July 2002, an immigration officer pointed a gun at Abdel-Muhti during a transfer between two New Jersey county jails. In November 2003, guards beat and kicked him in the Bergen County Jail, in Hackensack, New Jersey, after finding what they called "anti- government" publications in his cell. Earlier in 2003, Abdel- Muhti was kept in solitary confinement for almost 250 days in York County Prison in York, Pennsylvania; despite inquiries by his attorneys, authorities have still not offered any justification for keeping him in isolation. -- 30 -- 2. Center for Constitutional Rights Press Release: Judge Orders Palestinian Released April 9, 2004, New York – Late yesterday afternoon Federal District Judge Yvette Kane ordered the government to release jailed New York-based Palestinian immigrant activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti. Abdel-Muhti’s legal team at the Center for Constitutional Rights argued in a March 30 hearing that, as a stateless Palestinian, he could never be deported back to the place of his birth in the West Bank, and the court agreed. After a 17-month-long wait for a hearing, the ruling issued with remarkable speed, just nine days after the court heard oral arguments in the case at the federal court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Abdel-Muhti is a stateless Palestinian, born in Ramallah district in the West Bank in August 1947. Because he left the West Bank before the Israeli takeover in 1967, he cannot receive travel documents from Israel, the Palestinian National Authority, or Jordan that would enable him to return. Abdel-Muhti has lived without status in the United States for over 30 years. Abdel-Muhti was arrested on April 26, 2002, in Queens, New York, by the Absconder Task Force, a joint federal-state immigration enforcement unit which has primarily pursued Muslim men of Arab or South Asian extraction. His arrest came a month after he began working regularly at the New York radio station WBAI-FM, arranging interviews with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The Supreme Court’s 2001 ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis mandates the release of immigration detainees who prove to be undeportable after six months. Abdel-Muhti’s detention has lasted 714 days—nearly 23 months—with over 250 days in solitary confinement. Nonetheless, the government refused to release him or grant bond, first claiming it was on the verge of deporting him, then arguing that the six month Zadvydas clock should not run because he had obstructed his own removal by intentionally confusing his identity. The court rejected this claim resoundingly, saying the agency had failed to tell Abdel-Muhti what he could do to speed his own removal, and calling the government’s repeated demands for more information about his identity “a Kafkaesque exchange” culminating with a last-minute government request (filed just this Monday) that he resubmit the same type of Israeli visa request that Israel had rejected in his case some 30 years ago. “The government argues that Farouk stalled his own deportation by not clarifying his identity—that the government wasn’t sure he really is a Palestinian, and thus undeportable. The problem with that argument is that the government never told him what he could do to prove that he is who he says he is,” said Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lead counsel in the case. “Beyond this, as the court said, the government never really believed he wasn’t Palestinian—it was always a stalling tactic. This case proves how determined Attorney General John Ashcroft is to circumvent the Zadvydas decision. In nearly every case across the country decided under Zadvydas, the government claims the same things it has claimed here: that travel documents are about to be issued by another country or that the detainee is interfering with his own removal, so the court should let the government hold the detainee in jail just a bit longer to give it more time to deport him. That little bit extra added up to 714 days in this case.” -- 30 -- 4/9/04: Farouk Abdel-Muhti has now been held for 715 days ========================================================= Committee for the Release of Farouk Abdel-Muhti PO Box 20587, Tompkins Square Station, New York, NY 10009 Phone: 212-674-9499 * Email freefarouk@yahoo.com Websites: www.freefarouk.org * freefarouk.netfirms.com ========================================================= |
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