Judge: U.S. Rightly Excluded Scholar

“The result is that foreign scholars will continue to be barred from the country simply because they have said things that the Bush administration disagrees with”

The U.S. government did not violate the Constitution when it kept a Muslim scholar from entering the country for making charitable donations to a terrorist group, a judge ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Paul A. Crotty said the government had shown that it excluded Tariq Ramadan for legitimate reasons.

Ramadan, a visiting fellow in Oxford, England, has spoken at Harvard University, Stanford University and elsewhere, but his visa was revoked in August 2004.

On Sept. 16, 2005, Ramadan requested a nonimmigrant visa that would permit him to attend speaking engagements, but he was excluded on the grounds that he aided a terrorist group by making charitable contributions from 1998 to 2002. Read more