The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, will review a ban on respected Swiss Muslim academic and scholar Tariq Ramadan, who was forbidden from entering the United States in 2004 and beginning an appointment at the University of Notre Dame. The Bush Administration prevented him from entering the US, saying that he had contributed to a charity believed to have ties connections to terrorism.
An appeal will be heard next week, alongside a coalition of academic and civil liberties groups calling on the Obama administration to break with the Bush administration’s policies on blocking visas of some foreign scholars, writers, and activists. In a letter being released Wednesday, the coalition says so-called ideological exclusion “compromises the vitality of academic and political debate in the United States at a time when that debate is exceptionally important.”
