New York City has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by Arab and antiwar groups that were denied permits to host civil rights rallies during the 2004 Republican presidential convention.
The National Council of Arab Americans and the Act Now to Stop War & End Racism Coalition will split $50,000 plus $500,000 in legal fees, according to the agreement reached Tuesday that halts the three-year-old lawsuit.
However, city and park officials say they were justified in denying the permits to stage large rallies on Central Park’s Great Lawn, which underwent an $18 million restoration in the 1990s.
Previously, only groups numbering fewer than 50,000 were allowed to hold events on the Great Lawn, but the city now will temporarily allow groups of up to 75,000 to do so while it conducts a study as part of the agreement. The study will determine whether larger events can be held without causing damage to the Great Lawn’s landscape, which covers 13 acres.
The Partnership for Civil Justice (PCJ), a public-interest legal group, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the groups in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, arguing that the city cherry-picked which events could be held on the public property.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg “wanted to ban mass-assembly protest from Manhattan during the convention and forever after,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder of PCJ.
“We assert that if New York’s Great Lawn can be closed off to political assembly and protest, it will establish a precedent that will be replicated nationwide. There will be no parkland that will be safe for the continued use of the free-speech rights of the people,” Miss Verheyden-Hilliard said.
“We believe that the settlement of this matter is in the city’s best interests,” said Michael Cardozo, the city’s lead attorney.
The groups, which wanted to host 250,000 people at their rallies, said the ban on numbers violated their First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly.
The Great Lawn had hosted some of the city’s largest gatherings prior to its multimillion-dollar restoration, including a Mass by Pope John Paul II for 125,000 people in 1995, a concert for 500,000 by tenor Luciano Pavarotti in 1993 and a concert for more than 500,000 by Simon & Garfunkel in 1981.
“While New York barred the use of the Great Lawn for political protests against policies of the Bush administration, the Great Lawn has been the site of many large gatherings in recent years, including an American Online-sponsored rock concert by the Dave Matthews Band that promoted an AOL product, the Metropolitan Opera, the Philharmonic Orchestra, and other international celebrations and mass gatherings,” the PCJ said.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
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