The top of the US judiciary is interested in the FBI’s methods of collecting intelligence. The Supreme Court of the United States examines on Monday an appeal brought by three Muslims who accuse the federal police of having placed them under surveillance, because of their religion.
Three residents of California assure that the FBI had introduced an informant in their mosque to collect, between 2006 and 2007, information on the faithful.
Complaint for infringement of religious freedom and discrimination
This man “who had a criminal record, presented himself as a convert eager to revisit his Franco-Algerian roots,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, lawyer for the powerful association for the defense of civil rights ACLU which supports the plaintiffs. Police “asked him to collect as much information as possible about members of this community: phone numbers, email addresses, and secretly record conversations,” added the lawyer.
“She asked him to incite violence, but he scared people so much with his comments about the bombings, the jihad, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that they denounced him to the police, ”Ahilan Arulanantham said. After this incident, he had an argument with agents and decided to go public with his actions as a paid FBI informant, according to the lawyer. The imam and two faithful then filed a complaint against the FBI for infringement of religious freedom and discrimination.
Debates around state secrecy
The Ministry of Justice replied that it had started this monitoring program for objective reasons, and not because these people were Muslims. However, he sheltered behind state secrecy to refuse to detail these reasons and asked the courts to close the complaint. A lower court ruled in his favor, but an appeals court then ruled that the court should have examined the material protected by secrecy behind closed doors.
The highest American court has agreed to intervene and will answer the following question: can a court consider classified elements to judge the merits of a complaint calling into question the legality of a surveillance program of State ? The file is “extremely important” because it is a question of whether the government can prevent any prosecution against its surveillance programs, “even when there are very well-founded accusations, as here, of religious discrimination”, commented Ahilan Arulanantham. The Court is due to render its decision by June 2022.
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