Exposing the Costs of "Material Support" Laws

Next Tuesday February 23^rd will loom large in the history of civil liberties in the US.  For on that day the case of Holder v. The Humanitarian Law Project, described by Adam Liptak in the NY Times last week as " the court's first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the September 11 attacks" is considered in oral arguments before the Supreme Court.

At issue will be the constitutionality of the federal government "material support" laws, which bans organizations from assistance to groups designated by the State Department as terrorist organizations.

In a useful primer on the law and the stakes of the Supreme Court debate Ahilan T. Arslananthan explains how the use of the material support doctrine threatens to criminalize humanitarian relief and chill human rights activism.

ACS Blog writes

It was the late President Ronald Reagan who courageously declared that "a

hungry child knows no politics," in order to justify his decision to send food

aid to the Communist dictatorship in Ethiopia at the height of the Cold War.

Although he no doubt believed that defeating the communist regime in that country

was important to our national security, he was not willing to forego feeding starving

civilians on that basis.

Like most Americans, President Reagan would probably be quite shocked to learn

that our current government has cast aside his teaching and actually criminalized humanitarian

relief to victims of war and natural disaster in the name of the war on terror.

As I learned first-hand while doing tsunami relief work in Sri Lanka, that is exactly

what has happened under the so-called "material support of terrorism" laws.2 The

material support laws are a constellation of statutes found in the federal criminal code,

immigration code, and elsewhere, whose ostensible purpose is to enhance our national

security by stopping aid to terrorist groups. However, because of the enormous breadth

of these laws, humanitarian organizations and volunteers operating throughout the

world in conflict zones and natural disaster sites have scaled back and in some cases,

simply abandoned their efforts to aid those in greatest need of help.