Legal News

L.A. activist at the center of Supreme Court anti-terrorism case

By Richard Binder

Ralph Fertig, a 79-year-old pacifist and human rights activist from Los Angeles, will be the lead plaintiff in a Supreme Court case to be heard next week that will test whether speaking out on behalf of an oppressed foreign minority can result in a long prison term -- if, that is, the foreign minority in question is represented by a group deemed by the United States to be a terrorist organization.

Fertig, a retired judge and a USC professor of social work, has been advocating for the rights of the Kurdish minority in Turkey to speak their own language and fly their own colors.  He says all he wants to do is teach the Kurds the practices of nonviolence that he himself practiced as a civil rights activist in the '60s.  But the State Department has named the Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK, as a terrorist organization. And according to the anti-terrorism law expanded by Congress in 1996, a prison term of up to 15 years can be imposed for providing "training" or "expert advice or assistance" to a designated international terrorist group."Assistance" includes the sending of charitable funds.

Over the years, Fertig and the Humanitarian Law Project, a human rights group, have won a series of rulings that have shielded its members from prosecution. But the Obama administration appealed one of those recent rulings, arguing that they undercut "a vital part of the nation's effort to fight international terrorism."

Full story at LATimes.com.

Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on February 18, 2010 (boomark / email).