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New York Coalition Formed to Defend the Bill of Rights


It has always been the mission of the New York Civil Liberties Union to preserve the Bill of Rights, which were the first amendments to the United States Constitution. But those rights have come under such unprecedented attack since the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, they say, that a new group has been formed to augment their efforts.

The New York City Bill of Rights Defense Campaign brings together the Civil Liberties Union with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the NAACP, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund , and other groups in a campaign to protect civil liberties at the local and state level, while focusing New York efforts against federal encroachments. An organizing conference was held in Brooklyn on March 23rd at Long Island University.

"The attack on civil liberties -- the war on them, really -- has filtered down from the top and is manifested in state legislation and is also relevant on the city level," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. She cites in particular the New York Police Department's efforts to dismantle the 1985 Handshu decision (based on a lawsuit that went back to 1971) that limits police surveillance of lawful political activity such as demonstrations.

In February, Federal District Court Charles S. Haight, The New York Times reported, modified the Handshu order citing "fundamental changes in the threats to public security." Newsday reported that "Haight's ruling expands the department's investigatory powers, allowing all branches to investigate suspected political activity. Under the Handshu guidelines, such investigations were limited to one unit, the Public Security Section." It also "modifies departmental constraints that there must be a 'criminal predicate' - the suspicion of unlawful activity - to justify political surveillance or infiltration. The department will now be bound by FBI guidelines, Haight ruled, which are less restrictive."

As Lieberman puts it: "Without more than just saying there is a threat of terrorist attacks, there was not an adequate basis to eliminate or modify Handshu. It didn't prohibit police from spying, it simply set up a mechanism where the police centralized the operations in one unit and had to get prior or after-the-fact approval for surveillance or infiltration of organizations predicated on an internal showing of some criminal suspicion. And if it were just a matter of lawful protest, they wouldn't be able to get the approval." Lieberman said that the Handshu procedure "required a paper trail, which served as a significant deterrent."

At recent anti-war demonstrations, "police were out taking pictures from rooftops and on the streets," Lieberman noted. "They wouldn't have been doing that before." The Civil Liberties Union will soon publish a report on city and police tactics at the massive February 15 rally; demonstrators were not allowed to march past the United Nations.

But Lieberman said that "the major concern is that we'll see a return to undercover surveillance and infiltration and collecting dossiers on the loyal opposition. There is a history of dirty tricks and saboteurs that is too pervasive to ignore, particularly at a time when people are in motion out on the streets. We should not be intimidated or chilled by police disruption and becoming fact files at One Police Plaza."

The goals of the new coalition, Lieberman said, are to fight "the end of open government, pervasive government eavesdropping and surveillance, discriminatory and repressive immigration policies, preventive distention, military tribunals, and the profiling of immigrants."

City Councilmember Bill Perkins is developing a bill with Council members Hiram Monserrate of Queens and Charles Barron of Brooklyn that calls upon the city to monitor abuses in these areas. Lieberman noted that the fear of government repression by Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants is so pervasive that many "are afraid to access government services that they desperately need, including health care, calling the police, and even reporting fires."

In sum, Lieberman said, "the notion that the New York Civil Liberties Union should be launching a campaign to defend the bill of rights is in and of itself a commentary on our times. After all, it is our mission in life. But the attacks by Bush/Ashcroft in response to September 11th have created an enormous crisis that none of us could have predicted that we would see in our lifetimes. They are putting an infrastructure in place to return to secret government, dirty tricks, spying on lawful political activity, and amassing of data on private activity that sets up the kind of Big Brother society that goes well beyond anything we ever contemplated."

New York City Kept Enforcing Anti-Sodomy Laws for More than 20 Years After They Were Declared Unconstitutional

All sodomy laws in this country may be dead by June if the United States Supreme Court rules as expected in a Texas case just argued, but while New York's law has been unconstitutional under the state's constitution for 23 years, hundreds of New Yorkers have been prosecuted in that time in a scandal uncovered by Duncan Osborne of the Gay City News .

The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments March 26 on the Texas "Homosexual Conduct" law, banning people of the same sex from having sex. Depending on what grounds the court uses, it could get rid of this and three other gay-only sodomy laws as well as laws in nine other states that penalize non-vaginal intercourse for both same-sex and male-female couples. I covered the hearing for the Gay City News in "Reckoning for Sodomy."

Most of these states that still have these laws are in the South. New York's law was overturned by the Court of Appeals, the state's highest, in 1980. Osborne found that there were 39 arrests for consensual sodomy in Brooklyn alone from 1981 to 2001 and some in every borough. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes would not comment on the matter.

The invalidated law was not actually removed from the books by the state legislature until 2000. Richard Haymes, director of the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, told the paper, "That there is discretion to make arrests under a law that has been found unconstitutional seems even more surreal because what it is saying is that there are certain boroughs where it is safer to have certain types of sex than other boroughs."

Osborne wrote that "prosecutors may have been using the prospect of dismissing the sodomy charge in order to get a plea to a lesser charge."

Human Rights Commission Testifies at City Council

City Human Rights Commission Chair Patricia Gatling testified before the committees on general welfare and finance on March 13 that the goal of eliminating the 5,000 case backlog at the commission has "been achieved" and that the agency secured "close to a million dollars for complainants"-three times the amounts won in 2000 and 2001.

Despite an initial increase in funding for the agency under Mayor Bloomberg after steady starvation by the Giuliani administration, Gatling reported that their fiscal year 2003 budget was cut by $350,000 and 2004 has already been cut another $200,000. She noted that "the possibility of a larger reduction and personnel losses looms," and that they have tried to supplement the budget with "grants, academic partnerships, intern programs, volunteer staff, and a federal contract."

Gatling also testified, "The mayor intends to submit legislation that would amend the city's Human Rights Law to make it substantially equivalent to the federal Fair Housing Act" so that the commission can be paid to investigate and prosecute housing complaints for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Andy Humm is a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights. He is co-host of the weekly "Gay USA" on Manhattan Neighborhood Network (57 on Time-Warner; 109 on RCN) on Thursdays at 11 PM.

Restricting Demonstrations


Demonstrations against the impending pre-emptive war by the United States of America against Iraq marched past the Coliseum in Rome, the Houses of Parliament in London, the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia on February 15. But when they tried to march past the United Nations in New York, they were stopped by the city with the backing of the federal government.

The New York Police Department said that they could not handle a march for security reasons and the federal courts and the editorial boards of the daily newspapers in the city accepted this. With the country on an "orange alert" from the United States Department of Homeland Security, the demonstrators were restricted to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on a side street north of the United Nations and some surrounding streets and this was accepted as a necessary concession to security by many opinion makers in New York, while bitterly contested by the demonstration organizers from United for Peace and Justice and the New York Civil Liberties Union. Some City Council members were concerned enough about the denial of a march permit to call public hearings on February 25 before the Government Operations and Public Safety Committees.

The organizers of the demonstration have been criticized for not laying out their plans for a march well in advance. Beyond the fact that this was a response to recent developments in the United States campaign to attack Iraq, many demonstration organizers in New York no longer go to the Police Department for permits for large demonstrations because they end up in negotiations leading to a late selection of a route or site that, they feel, defeat the purpose of their action.

While much public attention has been focused on the restrictions on this anti-war demonstration, protests in New York City were steadily hemmed in during the Giuliani years. Mayor Giuliani did everything he could to close City Hall Plaza not just to protest demonstrations, but also to press conferences. Only after repeated lawsuits by Housing Works, an AIDS housing advocacy and service group, did groups win the right to press conferences and demonstrations, albeit severely limited.

In the not too distant past, the steps of City Hall were once as democratic a place as Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park in London, with two or three ad hoc press conferences or actions competing at the same time. Now behind iron gates and a metal detector just to get into the plaza, it is a much less dynamic area and infinitely more restrictive of free speech.

The argument of the police, often hailed as the finest in the world, that they cannot handle certain marches and demonstrations is also nothing new. When members of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization wanted to march up Fifth Avenue in 1993 to protest their exclusion from the St. Patrick's Day parade prior to the big event, the police made the same argument -- that they couldn't handle more than one parade that day, even at different times. (The police can and do handle more than one parade when they are led by different ethnic groups at the same time.) The gay group sued the police and Mayor Dinkins in federal court and lost. Their protest march on the morning of March 17, 1993 was stopped by the police who then proceeded to arrest more than 250 demonstrators, a procedure that arguably took a lot more time and trouble than letting them proceed up the avenue before any of the other St. Patrick's parade participants were scheduled to take it.

When a gay Wyoming college student, Matthew Shepherd, was brutally murder in 1998, there were marches in sympathy and outrage across the land. The New York demonstrators, however, were not permitted to march down Fifth Avenue from outside the Plaza Hotel on W. 59th Street. Police arrested most of the organizers at the outset and the demonstration, filled with anger at Shepherd's death and police tactics, turned into a chaotic mess leading to many arrests and injuries, not to mention many more traffic tie-ups all over the West Side than would have occurred had the march been allowed to proceed.

If the cause is more politically sensitive, marchers have been able to go forward.  When Amadou Diallo was killed by police with 41 bullets in 1999, a huge protest march against the police was allowed to proceed across the Brooklyn Bridge into a demonstration area near City Hall. It all depends whose ox is gored.

Ann Northrop, an AIDS activist who is a veteran of many of these marches, said of the February 15th anti-war demonstration, "It's the most shameful thing that Bloomberg has ever done. It could have been a peaceful huge march with no problems." Instead, people were herded onto side streets and made to walk blocks and blocks away from the rally. A police source said that orders came down from the top of the Bloomberg administration that New York was not to be seen as a center of protest and the police should therefore interfere with the ability of protesters to get to the rally by telling them that there were terrorist threats. People were being turned away as they arrived at Grand Central Station in some cases.

The New York Civil Liberties Union is determined to reverse the trend on restrictions on demonstrations in New York, just as the police are determined to continue using this method of penning demonstrators in (as they pen in revelers on New Year's Eve in Times Square). "As long as the judiciary goes along with this," Northrop said, "we're stymied. But as long as we turn out in huge numbers, no matter what they do to us, we'll be successful. We have to keep the pressure on. That's what stopped the Vietnam War."

Andy Humm is a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights. He is co-host of the weekly "Gay USA" on Manhattan Neighborhood Network (57 on Time-Warner; 109 on RCN) on Thursdays at 11 PM.

Civil Liberties since 9/11. Also: Vacant seats on the human rights commission; the new local about same-sex marriages.


Monica Terazzi admits that, a year after the terrorist attacks, Arab Americans in New York are no longer subjected to the threats and harassment that many of them underwent in the immediate aftermath. "We have experienced a lot fewer incidents of violent crimes," said Terazzi, the New York director of the American Arab Discrimination Committee. Indeed, the City Commission on Human Rights has not seen many complaints by Arab Americans of their civil liberties being violated.

But 9/11 still holds a special threat to the civil liberties of Arab-Americans in New York -- as well as to that of the rest of New Yorkers.

"We are still seeing a lot of workplace discrimination and incidents of police harassment. " Terazzi said. She is especially concerned that the government is detaining Arab immigrants and holding them for months on end for such infractions as overstaying their visas. "A Palestinian man with Jordanian citizenship was recently deported for not reporting an address change," she said. "This had never previously been a deportable offense... Everyone knows someone who has been harassed or detained. It is pretty scary, the notion that police can swoop down on your house and disappear with your husband."

Air travel poses special problems for those of Middle Eastern descent. "Many Arab Americans have been pulled out of line at airports," she said, despite assurances from United States Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta that there would be no such racial profiling. "Arab American passengers have been ejected from flights after going through security. I have spoken to lots of people who have faced so much harassment that they say, 'I'm not traveling again.'"

It is true that most of the incidents that Terazzi talks about are "anecdotal" -- they are not listed in official statistics, such as complaints registered with the City Commission on Human Rights. "People don't want to draw attention to themselves," Terazzi explained. "There is a fear of anything associated with the government." Her group held a town meeting in Bay Ridge with local and federal government agencies represented and the reaction from the crowd was "we don't want to go there; it's the government."

Staff members of the human rights commission are conscious of this reluctance, and have been speaking to small groups of Arab Americans, encouraging them to make reports and reminding them that they do not have to be citizens to do so. But few have come forward, despite an assurance from Commissioner Patricia L. Gatling that "discrimination has no place in this city -- not today, not tomorrow, and not on the anniversary of the attack on our nation at the hands of terrorists." She said that the city human rights law "is one of the most comprehensive in the nation" and that she and Mayor Michael Bloomberg are committed to "the vigorous enforcement of the law that protect these rights. And that protection extends to all New Yorkers, not just some of them."

Indeed, all New Yorkers should be concerned about the threats to their civil rights, says Donna Lieberman, the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "In September and October of last year," she said, "I didn't dare contemplate how bad things would get. Some of the measures that the government has adopted have seriously eroded our fundamental civil rights and cry out for reversal." One example is the TIPS program, the Bush plan to recruit millions of volunteers to do domestic surveillance. Another is the "facial recognition technology" which is being employed at the Statue of Liberty, which is "about as accurate as heads or tails" in identifying evil-doers, while creating "a Big Brother-type of encroachment."

"What's heartening," Lieberman said, "is that...the American people have resisted to a certain extent. That's why we have not seen a proliferation of military trials. That's why TIPS has been met with resistance."

In New York, Lieberman said, the state legislators "enacted tough anti-terrorism legislation without debate or thoughtful consideration in an effort that was designed more to attain political capital than protect security. It increased death penalty application and defined terrorism in a vague and chilling way." Despite the rush to pass the law last year, "we haven't seen any prosecutions." She believes the law would not hold up in court.

The New York City Department of Education has a whole page of resources for administrators and teachers on how to help students cope with the traumatic effects of September 11, but there is scant acknowledgement in the school system's special materials on the stigmatization to which many students of Middle East origin or descent have been subjected. The resource page does, however, promote a special post 9/11 series on PBS-TV's "In the Mix" called "The New Normal" that focuses on dealing with ethnic, racial, and other human differences. And the "9/11 as History" program cited from the Families and Work Institute does include a lesson plan that deals with "compassion and diversity."

New Yorkers concerned about human rights should know about two events timed to the one-year anniversary. Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization of family members of those who perished on 9/11, is sponsoring a march across the Brooklyn Bridge on September 10. And on September 11 at 6 PM, a candlelight vigil will begin at Atlantic and Court Streets in Brooklyn, the heart of the Arab American community in New York, to gather for "remembrance, prayer, reflection, and unity," according to Terazzi.

New Human Rights Commissioners to be Named This Month

Mayor Bloomberg is finally getting around to filling twelve vacancies on what is supposed to be the 15-member City Commission on Human Rights. An announcement is expected in mid-September.

The beleaguered agency, which lost 75 percent of its funding under Mayor Giuliani while ironically gaining Charter status, got a new chairperson, Patricia L. Gatling, back in February. She is the only paid member of the Commission and directs the staff. But only two of the non-salaried commissioners are left-Marta Varela, who chaired the agency under Giuliani, and Derek Bryson Park. This minimum of three commissioners is required to make final determinations on cases. When all fifteen commissioners are on board, rotating panels of three review decisions and make recommendations to the full commission.

Gay Rights Continue to Advance in Wake of 9/11

In June, I wrote an Issue of the Week on "The Rights of Same-Sex Partners" and how they had advanced after the public saw how domestic partner survivors of the victims of 9/11 received second class treatment. While most of these are state and federal issues, the City Council is doing what it can to bring about spousal equivalency for domestic partners, gay and straight. In August, it passed Intro 114 by a vote of 34 to 7, with four abstentions. In it, New York City recognizes domestic partnerships or same-sex marriages contracted in other jurisdictions under our domestic partners law. In other words, the couples will not have to register again in the city just as married couples don't have to get married here to have their union acknowledged. Mayor Bloomberg signed the bill on August 27 and it went into effect immediately.



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