Jameel Jaffer

Last updated
Jameel Jaffer
Jameel Jaffer (cropped).jpg
Jaffer in 2017
Born1971 (age 52–53)
Nationality Canadian
Alma mater Williams College (BA)
University of Cambridge (MPhil)
Harvard University (JD)
Occupation Lawyer
Known for Human rights work

Jameel Jaffer is a Canadian human rights and civil liberties attorney and the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was created to defend the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. [1] The Institute engages in "strategic litigation, research, and public education." [2] Among the Knight Institute's first lawsuits was a successful constitutional challenge to President Trump's practice of blocking critics from his Twitter account. [3]

Contents

Jaffer was previously a Deputy Legal Director at the American Civil Liberties Union. [4] In that role, he was particularly notable for the role he played in litigating Freedom of Information Act requests that led to the release of documents concerning the torture of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and in CIA black sites. Among the documents released were interrogation directives signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; emails written by FBI agents who witnessed the torture of prisoners; autopsy reports relating to prisoners who were killed in U.S. custody; and legal memos in which the Office of Legal Counsel stated that so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" involving mental and physical torment and coercion that were widely regarded as torture might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority. [5] [6] The New York Times billed the lawsuit "one of the most successful in the history of public disclosure." [5]

Personal life and education

Jaffer's family originates from Tanzania; his father's side is from Zanzibar while his mother's side is from Dar es Salaam. His family follow the Isma'ilism sect of Islam, although Jaffer does not describe himself as religious. [7]

Jaffer grew up in Canada and is a graduate of Upper Canada College, a private school in Toronto. [8] Jaffer received his bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1994, his master's degree from the University of Cambridge in 1996, and his Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1999, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. [9] After graduating from Harvard, Jaffer served as a law clerk to the Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, the then-Chief Justice of Canada. [6]

Jaffer is the founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. He was on the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from June 2002 until August 2016. [10]

In 2004, Jaffer litigated a successful constitutional challenge to the USA Patriot Act, obtaining a federal court ruling that invalidated the "national security letter" provision. [11] After Congress amended the law, the federal district court invalidated the provision again in 2007. [12]

In 2006, Jaffer filed a case challenging the Bush administration's refusal to issue a visa to Tariq Ramadan, a well-known Islamic thinker. [13] The case was brought on behalf of the American Association of Religion, the American Association of University Professors, and PEN American Center. A federal appeals court sided with Jaffer and his clients in 2009, finding that the exclusion of Professor Ramadan was unconstitutional. [13] After that ruling, the Obama administration reversed the exclusion of Dr. Ramadan and issued him a visa. [14]

In 2012 and 2013, Jaffer argued two successful appeals, one before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and another before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, relating to the Obama administration's refusal to release Justice Department memos concerning the "targeted killing" program. [15] [16]

In 2012, Jaffer argued Clapper v. Amnesty International USA before the U.S. Supreme Court. [17] The case involved a constitutional challenge to a federal statute that gave the National Security Agency broad power to monitor international communications. The Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiffs 5-4, holding that they lacked "standing" to bring their suit. [18]

Along with Jimmy Wales and Lila Tretikov of the Wikimedia Foundation, Jaffer filed a lawsuit in March 2015 against the National Security Agency (NSA) challenging the agency's surveillance activities "through which the U.S. government intercepts, copies, and searches almost all international and many domestic text-based communications" on the Wikimedia platform.

Between 2010 and 2016, Jaffer co-led the litigation that resulted in the disclosure of the Obama administration's "drone memos." [16] [19] Jaffer's book about the U.S. drone campaign, The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law, was published by The New Press in November 2016. [20] Edward Snowden called the book "a much-needed corrective to the linguistic manipulation and official obfuscation that have made [the targeted-killing] policies possible." [20]

Until August 2016, Jaffer was deputy legal director of the ACLU, and director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, which housed the ACLU's work relating to free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. [21] [8] [9] [22] He litigated many leading cases relating to national security and human rights, including cases concerning surveillance, torture, rendition, and "targeted killing." [23]

Jaffer is an Executive Editor of Just Security, a national security blog. [24]

Community events

Jaffer was invited to celebrate Ramadan at the White House in 2009. [25]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Civil Liberties Union</span> Legal advocacy organization in the United States

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit human rights organization founded in 1920. The organization strives "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." The ACLU works through litigation and lobbying and has more than 1,800,000 members as of July 2018, with an annual budget over $300 million. ACLU affiliates are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation.

American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft is a lawsuit filed on behalf of a formerly unknown Internet Service Provider (ISP) company under the pseudonym John Doe, Inc. by the American Civil Liberties Union against the U.S. federal government, by the Department of Justice under former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The No Fly List, maintained by the United States federal government's Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), is one of several lists included in algorithmic rulesets used by government agencies and airlines to decide who to allow to board airline flights. The TSC's No Fly List is a list of people who are prohibited from boarding commercial aircraft for travel within, into, or out of the United States. This list has also been used to divert aircraft away from U.S. airspace that do not have start- or end-point destinations within the United States. The number of people on the list rises and falls according to threat and intelligence reporting. There were reportedly 16,000 names on the list in 2011, 21,000 in 2012, and 47,000 in 2013.

The state secrets privilege is an evidentiary rule created by United States legal precedent. Application of the privilege results in exclusion of evidence from a legal case based solely on affidavits submitted by the government stating that court proceedings might disclose sensitive information which might endanger national security. United States v. Reynolds, which involved alleged military secrets, was the first case that saw formal recognition of the privilege.

<i>American Civil Liberties Union v. National Security Agency</i>

American Civil Liberties Union v. National Security Agency, 493 F.3d 644, is a case decided July 6, 2007, in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the plaintiffs in the case did not have standing to bring the suit against the National Security Agency (NSA), because they could not present evidence that they were the targets of the so-called "Terrorist Surveillance Program" (TSP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David D. Cole</span> American legal scholar

David D. Cole is the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Before joining the ACLU in July 2016, Cole was the Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center from March 2014 through December 2016. He has published in various legal fields including constitutional law, national security, criminal justice, civil rights, and law and literature. Cole has litigated several significant First Amendment cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, as well a number of influential cases concerning civil rights and national security. He is also a legal correspondent to several mainstream media outlets and publications.

The Constitution Project is a non-profit think tank in the United States whose goal is to build bipartisan consensus on significant constitutional and legal questions. Its founder and president is Virginia Sloan. The Constitution Project’s work is divided between two programs: the Rule of Law Program and the Criminal Justice Program. Each program houses bipartisan committees focused on specific constitutional issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York Civil Liberties Union</span> Legal advocacy organization in New York State

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is a civil rights organization in the United States. Founded in November 1951 as the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, it is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan organization with nearly 50,000 members across New York State.

William H. "Chip" Mellor is a co-founder of the Institute for Justice, its former president and general counsel, and now the chairman of its board of directors. During his career as the Institute's General Counsel, Mellor pursued constitutional litigation in four areas: economic liberty, property rights, school choice, and free speech.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doe v. Gonzales</span> 2004 US lawsuit

John Doe v. Alberto R. Gonzales was a case in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Library Connection, and several then-pseudonymous librarians, challenged Section 2709 of the Patriot Act; it was consolidated on appeal with a separate case, Doe v. Ashcroft.

William P. Quigley is a law professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. He was named the Pope Paul VI National Teacher of Peace by Pax Christi USA in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Merrill</span> Free speech and privacy advocate

Nicholas Merrill is an American system administrator, computer programmer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Calyx Internet Access, an Internet and hosted service provider founded in 1995, and of the non-profit Calyx Institute. He was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the National Security Letters statute in the USA PATRIOT Act and consequently the first person to have a National Security Letter gag order completely lifted.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John A. Rizzo</span> American attorney (1947–2021)

John Anthony Rizzo was an American attorney who worked as a lawyer in the Central Intelligence Agency for 34 years. He was the deputy counsel or acting general counsel of the CIA for the first nine years of the War on Terror, during which the CIA held dozens of detainees in black site prisons around the globe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disposition Matrix</span> Database of information for tracking, capturing, or killing suspected enemies of the United States

The Disposition Matrix, informally known as a kill list, is a database of information for tracking, capturing, rendering, or killing suspected enemies of the United States. Developed by the Obama administration beginning in 2010, it goes beyond existing kill lists and is intended to become a permanent fixture of U.S. policy. The process determining the criteria for killing is not public and was heavily shaped by National Counterterrorism Director and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John O. Brennan.

Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, 568 U.S. 398 (2013), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that Amnesty International USA and others lacked standing to challenge section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as amended by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David J. Barron</span> American judge (born 1967)

David Jeremiah Barron is an American lawyer who serves as the Chief United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and former S. William Green Professor of Public Law at Harvard Law School. He previously served as the Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice.

<i>American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper</i> American federal court case

American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787, was a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its affiliate, the New York Civil Liberties Union, against the United States federal government as represented by then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The ACLU challenged the legality and constitutionality of the National Security Agency's (NSA) bulk phone metadata collection program.

<i>Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA</i> Lawsuit against the U.S. National Security Agency

Wikimedia Foundation, et al. v. National Security Agency, et al. was a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation and several other organizations against the National Security Agency (NSA), the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), and other named individuals, alleging mass surveillance of Wikipedia users carried out by the NSA. The suit claims the surveillance system, which NSA calls "Upstream", breaches the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, and the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

William B. Rubenstein is an American legal scholar and the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Professionally, he specializes in complex litigation and civil rights advocacy. He has advocated widely for the rights of gay, lesbian, and HIV-positive individuals. He teaches civil procedure and complex litigation classes.

Ben Wizner is an American lawyer, writer, and civil liberties advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union. Since July 2013, he has been the lead attorney of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

References

  1. ↑ Mccaskill, Nolan D. (29 June 2016). "Columbia University names 1st director of First Amendment Institute". POLITICO. Retrieved 2019-12-20.
  2. ↑ "About the Knight Institute". knightcolumbia.org. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  3. ↑ Savage, Charlie (2019-07-09). "Trump Can't Block Critics From His Twitter Account, Appeals Court Rules (Published 2019)". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  4. ↑ "Outgoing ACLU Director Reviews Tenure Fighting National Security Battles". NPR.org. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  5. 1 2 Scott Shane (2009-08-29). "A.C.L.U. Lawyers Mine Documents For Truth". New York Times
  6. 1 2 Colin Freeze (2010-04-19). "Canadian emerges as voice for detainees" Archived 2011-07-10 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ↑ Ronald J. Grele (April 27, 2012). "The Reminiscences of Jameel Jaffer" (PDF). The Rule of Law Oral History Project. Columbia Center for Oral History . Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  8. 1 2 Iain Marlow (2009-08-30). "How Canadian lawyer unearthed U.S. torture documents". Toronto Star. Archived from the original on 2009-09-01.
  9. 1 2 "Administration of torture". American Civil Liberties Union. Archived from the original on 2007-10-21.
  10. ↑ "Outgoing ACLU Director Reviews Tenure Fighting National Security Battles". NPR.org. Retrieved 2016-11-08.
  11. ↑ Nat Hentoff (2004-11-09). "Cuffing Bush and the FBI"
  12. ↑ Mark Hamblett (2007-09-07). "Federal Judge Rules Unconstitutional Parts of the Patriot Act".
  13. 1 2 Benjamin Weiser (2009-07-17). "Court Reverses Ruling Dealing With Visa of Muslim Scholar".
  14. ↑ Kirk Semple (2010-04-07). "At Last Allowed, Muslim Scholar Visits"
  15. ↑ Debra Cassens Weiss (2013-03-18). "DC Circuit requires CIA to give some drone strike information to judge in ACLU lawsuit"
  16. 1 2 Benjamin Weiser (2014-03-21). "U.S. Ordered to Release Memo in Awlaki Killing".
  17. ↑ "Clapper vs Amnesty International USA" . Retrieved 2019-12-20.
  18. ↑ Adam Liptak (2013-02-26). "Justices Turn Back Challenge to Broader U.S. Eavesdropping".
  19. ↑ Jameel Jaffer (2014-06-21). "The Drone Memo Cometh."
  20. 1 2 "The Drone Memos | The New Press". The New Press. Retrieved 2016-11-08.
  21. ↑ "Jameel Jaffer". Huffington Post. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
  22. ↑ Lindsay Fortado (2005-05-09). "Jameel Jaffer, 33: Watchdog leads charge over civil liberties". National Law Journal. Archived from the original on 2006-03-25.
  23. ↑ "ACLU News & Commentary". American Civil Liberties Union. Retrieved 2019-12-20.
  24. ↑ "Home Page". Just Security. Retrieved 2019-12-20.
  25. ↑ Peter Baker(2009-09-01). "The White House Celebrates Ramadan"

Appearances on C-SPAN

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.