The Supreme Court of the United States inflicted a setback on Friday to three Muslims, who accuse the federal police of having spied on them because of their religion after the attacks of September 11, without putting an end to the file.

The high court unanimously considered that the government had the right to invoke state secrecy to refuse to provide information to the court responsible for studying the complaint of the three men.

A 2019 Court of Appeal decision

This judgment, limited in scope to a very technical point, annuls a decision taken by an appeal court in 2019 and returns the file to it for it to continue examining the case.

"This is a dangerous signal for religious freedom and government accountability," tweeted the powerful ACLU civil rights organization that represents the plaintiffs.

“But we are not at the end of the road” and “we will continue to fight”, she added.

An informant in their mosque

Concretely, three California residents assure that the FBI introduced, in 2006 and 2007, an informant in their mosque to collect information on the faithful.

This man, who presented himself as a convert, according to them collected the telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and secretly recorded the conversations of many members of the community.

To test his interlocutors, he had mentioned bomb attacks or jihad, but the worried faithful had denounced him to the police.

After this incident, he argued with federal police officers and decided to go public with his actions as a paid FBI informant.

Violation of religious freedom

The imam and two faithful then filed a complaint against the FBI for infringement of religious freedom and discrimination.

The Ministry of Justice replied that it launched this surveillance program for objective reasons, and not because these people were Muslims.

He took refuge behind state secrecy to refuse to detail these reasons and asked the courts to close the complaint.

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