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Last August, in
a usually sleepy
month, we received
two unprecedented
decisions in our
cases. First, in Floyd
v. City of New York,
the federal district
court in New York
ruled, following our nine-week trial, that the
New York Police Department’s divisive stop-
and-frisk program has been systematically
violating the Fourth Amendment rights of all
New Yorkers and that the largest police force
in the country was unlawfully targeting Blacks
and Latinos in violation of the Constitutional
guarantee of Equal Protection. Just a few days
later, in Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Lively, a
federal judge in Massachusetts held that our
case against anti-gay extremist minister Scott
Lively for his conspiratorial role in persecuting
LGBTI persons in Uganda could proceed and
ruled for the first time that sexual orientation
and gender identity—just like race, religion,
gender—are protected under international
human rights law. The sheer audacity of these
cases and the rulings they produced continues
CCR’s radical litigation approach and framed
our work for the rest of the year.
In Floyd, after a politically hostile court of
appeals panel tried to subvert the district
judge’s ruling, CCR’s litigation, organizing and
activism kicked into high gear, pressuring the
new mayor, Bill de Blasio, to drop the appeal
and proceed with court ordered reforms of the
NYPD. In a dramatic joint press conference in
the Brownsville Recreation Center in Brooklyn,
the new mayor, standing next to Vince Warren
and CCR client Nicholas Peart, promised to
do just that. Our negotiations with the less-
hostile de Blasio administration continued in
other places, creating a final settlement of our
remaining claims in Vulcans v. City of New
York, which requires serious reforms to the
recruitment, hiring and promotion of Black
firefighters, and millions of dollars in back pay.
The settlement capped a 40-year struggle of
the Vulcan Society and this year, produced the
most diverse firefighter class in New York City
histor y.
Our prisoners’ rights cases are proceeding on
pace. In our challenge to the federal govern-
ment’s Kafkaesque “Communications Man-
agement Units,” we’ve assembled a wealth of
evidence for the district court showing that this
disciplinary system is arbitrary and unconsti-
tutional. And in our challenge to long-term
solitary confinement at the notorious Pelican
Bay prison in California, the court granted our
request to represent the entire class of indi-
viduals subject to the soul-and-body-destroy-
ing effects of prolonged isolation. CCR is using
Freedom of Information Act litigation to force
transparency around the increasingly punitive
detention practices in our immigration policy.
Our International Human Rights docket contin-
ued our work for international solidarity, justice
and accountability. We continued our alliance
with the amazing Survivors Network of those
Abused by Priests (SNAP). Our filings with the
United Nations accountability mechanisms
forced Vatican officials, for the first time, to
face survivors of its policies and to answer
aggressive questioning by UN officials—
which produced strong international pressure
demanding that the Vatican take responsibility
for its documented role to cover up and abet
priest sexual violence against children. The
last of our three cases against private military
contractors for their role in torture and abuse
of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Al Shimari v.
CACI, was initially dismissed following the
Supreme Court’s Kiobel decision, but the
appeals court overturned the decision and
upheld the use of the Alien Tort Statute. Our
work defending Palestinian human rights
activists took on particular urgency in light of
an uptick in campus crackdowns on lawful pro-
tests and state legislative attempts to punish
academic organizations encouraging boycotts
of Israeli universities.
Our Guantánamo and related national security
work continues as resilient as ever despite
enormous challenges. Since last year’s hunger
strike 17 men have been transferred from
Guantánamo, including CCR client Djamel
Ameziene, who is with his family in Algeria and
on a slow path to recovery. Still, on this, the
10
th
anniversary of our Supreme Court victory
in Rasul v. Bush, 149 men remain, stuck in a
political-judicial vortex we are continuing to
contain. Our case challenging the “targeted
killing” of U.S. citizens in Yemen, Al-Aulaqi v.
Obama, was dismissed by the district court
and our clients, after years of agonizing frustra-
tion with the U.S. judicial system, chose not to
appeal. Our challenge to the NYPD’s program
of “human mapping” and suspicionless surveil-
lance of Muslims in New Jersey was dismissed
by a district court ruling which fully embraced
the program’s grossly discriminatory premises,
but we are confident about our appeal. And,
furthering our attempts to challenge domestic
law enforcement manifestations of the “War
on Terror,” we filed a challenge to the FBI’s
standardless No Fly List and the FBI’s practice
of placing Muslims on the list as a condition for
becoming informants on their community—a
practice that violates their rights to free asso-
ciation and freedom of religion.
In the following pages, you will find more infor-
mation on the breadth of issues we’ve covered
through our cases and joint projects with our
partners.
Message from the Legal Director
Baher Azmy, Legal Director