By IANS,
Washington: Leading South Asian groups have welcomed the rescinding of a “misguided policy” of enhanced security screening for passengers travelling from 14 predominantly Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan, to the United States.
“The new policy announced today is a step in the right direction, and we call upon the Transportation Security Administration to apply it in a neutral and nondiscriminatory manner,” said Deepa Iyer, Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT).
“Targeting travellers simply based on their national origin, as the previous directive did, resulted in profiling, civil rights violations, and the diversion of critical resources that our country needs to identify genuine threats to security.”
US authorities Friday announced that new security protocols will supersede the 14-country directive. This new system will be based on specific threat-based intelligence information, and will be applied to all passengers travelling to the United States.
After the implementation of the earlier policy, SAALT had expressed serious concerns about the policy’s reliance upon nationality and country of origin as triggers for heightened security procedures, and its disproportionate impact on community members of Arab, Muslim and South Asian descent.
Welcoming the change, The Sikh Coalition said since the old “policy focused solely on national origin and not individual behaviour, it effectively made profiling the law of the United States. Its withdrawal is a step in the right direction towards ending federal government profiling.”
At the same time Coalition announced its intention to continue fighting to ensure Sikhs and other minorities are not the subject of unfair scrutiny by air travel security.
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, a prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, has also welcomed new intelligence-based airline security measures.