By Rehan K. Hasan and Rosemary Harris Lytle

This week, the country reflects on the 10-year anniversary of the four tragic and devastating attacks of September 11, 2001. All told, nearly 3,000 people died. What happened can never be diminished. We all lost something that day – loved ones, innocence, trust, freedoms. Our world changed.

But was it 9/11 that changed our lives or our reaction to it?

Because of what happened on September 11, 2001, Muslims and others in this country have been branded terrorists; guilty by ethnicity or appearance, profiled at every airport, detained on meaningless and unlawful charges, violated by official government intrusion and surveillance; an entire community ostracized and demonized by law enforcement, by Homeland Security, by the Transportation Security Administration, which didn’t even exist until shortly after those twin towers went down.

So many lives – and liberties – infringed upon.

According to a Pew Research Center survey released last month, 43 percent of the Muslim American respondents said they had personally experienced harassment in the past year. The survey also said that 52 percent complained that their community is singled out by government for surveillance every single day. That doesn’t even include the intrusions the rest of us have faced: privacy violations, whole body imaging as we walk into federal, state buildings, being intimidated by cops in riot gear at any politically charged public event. Our police became militarized, our privacy shredded, and our appearances- from our clothes to our very pigment-subject to suspicion.

Looking back in our history, we see other sad examples of our reaction to tragedies and change and the violations of civil rights and civil liberties that resulted. We look at the change brought about by the end of slavery and see the reaction: rampant lynching and Jim Crow laws designed to turn back the freedom that the end of slavery had insured. We look at the tragedy of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and see our reaction: more than one hundred thousand guiltless Japanese Americans legally held captive by our government at West Coast camps.

It’s a horrible history.

What has happened to Muslim Americans seems just as sinister, just as inhumane, just as intrusive of our rights and freedoms –even without burning crosses and barbed wire fences -- because in the name of defending the U.S. and all that we stand for, democracy, love of country, etc., we have used the 9/11 attacks to dehumanize and place in peril again the rights of an entire group of people. We seem to have forgotten that we must always – especially in times of national challenge and change – vigilantly uphold our core values. We seem to have forgotten that when we violate the freedoms of one group, the freedoms of all groups are at risk.

We seem to have forgotten that discriminating against Muslim Americans, those who are Middle Eastern or South Asian and are citizens and residents of this country is unconstitutional, unfair, and a violation of all the things we as Americans say we hold most dear. Tragedy isn’t new to America; it’s as old as America herself. But our fear of terrorism has created new tragedy – more fear. Fear of the hijab, the burka, the abaya, and the taqiyah doesn’t make us safer or move us forward. All it has done is cement what some have called “the turban effect.” In our Western world, the turban has come to symbolize terrorism. Woe be unto that person who shows up at the airport wearing a turban – though it happens all the time with discrimination shortly following.

As we pause to remember all those who lost their lives on 9/11, all those whose lives and livelihoods were forever changed, it bears repeating that we should remember something else, too.

We must not today repeat the mistakes of our past. Our history shows that when the government targets people based on race, ethnicity, belief, political activity and association instead of focusing on violence or violations of law, disastrous consequences for our democratic ideals follow. In the past, there was Jim Crow, Sedition Acts, McCarthy “blacklisting.” All of this betrayed American laws and values but did not make us any safer, not for a nanosecond.

So, this week we remember those who were lost. But let’s also remember that our laws and policies must not only keep our nation safe but must also treat people fairly – regardless of the color of their skin, their religion or the garment they choose to wear on their head.

Rehan K. Hasan is Chair of the Board of the ACLU of Colorado

Rosemary Harris Lytle is ACLU of Colorado Communications Director

The people of Denver should not have to pay the price for a bureaucrat who failed to do his job.

Ron Perea’s failure to fire Officers Murr and Sparks for their brutal beating of Michael DeHerrera and their despicable cover-up of the assault rightly cost Perea his job. Both officers received nothing more than slaps on the wrist and were permitted to continue terrorizing the people of Denver. This wasn’t an isolated incident- just three months earlier; Officer Murr was one of a trio of officers who beat Community College of Denver student Alex Landau so badly that the city ended up settling for nearly $800,000.

Denver took a step backward today.

There is a time for process, for paperwork and for following regulations, but when the consequences of years of tangled red tape literally puts residents at risk of losing life and limb, then leadership and principles must prevail.

If these two officers will once again patrol the streets of Denver, their reinstatement is more than an insult to the residents of our city; it is a threat. We welcome Interim Manager of Safety Ashley Kilroy’s disagreement with the Civil Service Commission, and we look forward to the City Attorney’s appeal of this decision. But no matter how this bureaucratic process plays out, we call upon Mayor Michael Hancock to exercise the leadership he promised us and restore our faith in Denver law enforcement by keeping these brutes off the street.

Landmark Human Rights Case Finds that Failure to Enforce a Restraining Order and Indifference to Domestic Violence Led to Daughters’ Deaths

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a landmark decision, an international tribunal has found the U.S. government responsible for human rights violations against a Colorado woman and her three deceased children who were victims of domestic violence.

Jessica Lenahan (Gonzales) v. United States is the first case brought by a domestic violence survivor against the U.S. before an international human rights body, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The IACHR ruling also sets forth comprehensive recommendations for changes to U.S. law and policy pertaining to domestic violence.

The case concerns a tragic 1999 incident in which police in Castle Rock, Colorado failed to respond to Jessica Lenahan’s repeated calls for help after her estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, kidnapped their three young children in violation of a domestic violence restraining order. Ten hours after Lenahan’s first call to the police, her husband drove up to the Castle Rock Police Department and began firing his gun at the police station. The police returned fire, killing Gonzales. Inside the truck, the police found the bodies of the three girls – Rebecca, Katheryn, and Leslie – who had been shot dead. Local authorities failed to conduct a proper investigation into the children’s deaths, resulting in questions about the cause, time, and place of their deaths that remain to this day.

“I have waited 12 years for justice, knowing in my heart that police inaction led to the tragic and untimely deaths of my three young daughters,” said Lenahan. “Today’s decision tells the world that the government violated my human rights by failing to protect me and my children from domestic violence.”

Lenahan is represented by the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law, the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The commission’s determination that the United States violated Ms. Lenahan’s and her children’s human rights by failing to ensure their protection from domestic violence has far-reaching implications,” said Professor Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, director of the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law. “As our country seeks to promote human rights of women and children around the world, we must also look at our own record here at home.”

The commission’s decision stands in stark contrast to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Town of Castle Rock v. Jessica Gonzales (2005), where the justices ruled that Lenahan (then Gonzales) had no constitutional right to police protection, and that the failure of the police to enforce Lenahan's order of protection was not unconstitutional. Lenahan then filed a petition against the U.S. before the IACHR, alleging violations of international human rights.

“Now that the commission has appropriately found the police and the United States responsible for their appalling lack of action, it is critical that they be held accountable,” said Lenora Lapidus, director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. “We can no longer accept police departments' failure to treat domestic violence seriously and to regard it as simply a private matter unworthy of serious police attention.”

Established in 1959, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is charged with promoting the observance of and respect for human rights throughout the Americas. The commission is expressly authorized to examine allegations of human rights violations by all 35 member-states of the Organization of American States, which includes the United States, and to investigate specific allegations of violations of Inter-American human rights treaties, declarations and other legal instruments.

"We know that the issue of violence against women is one that the Obama Administration cares deeply about,” said Peter Rosenblum, director of the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic. “We encourage the Administration to work with the appropriate state and local officials to address and adapt the Commission’s recommendations in a meaningful way."

More information on this case can be found at:

www.aclu.org/human-rights-womens-rights/jessica-gonzales-v-usa; www.law.miami.edu/hrc/hrc_gonzalez_usa.php
www.law.columbia.edu/human-rights-institute/initiatives/interamerican/gonzales
www.aclu-co.org/case/town-castle-rock-v-gonzales