Group Urges High Court to Find Unconstitutional the Patriot Act’s ‘Material Support’ Provision

Next year the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in two cases challenging provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT as constitutionally suspect. Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a brief in one of the cases, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, arguing that the provision barring "material support" is too broad, vague and thus violates the Constitution's First Amendment.

In a press statement about its brief, CCR cooperating attorney David Cole said, "This statute is so sweeping that it treats human rights advocates as criminal terrorists, and threatens them with 15 years in prison for advocating nonviolent means to resolve disputes. In our view, the First Amendment does not permit the government to make advocating human rights or other lawful, peaceable activity a crime simply because it is done for the benefit of, or in conjunction with, a group the Secretary of State has blacklisted."

The CCR's statement also notes, "The lower courts held unconstitutionally vague the law's prohibition on the provision of ‘services,' ‘expert advice or assistance,' and ‘training,' reasoning that these terms could easily encompass a wide range of lawful speech, such as providing training in international law. The Obama administration sought Supreme Court review of that decision."

In analysis of both cases, SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston writes that the groups and individuals involved in the cases -- the other being Humanitarian Law Project, et al., v. Holder -- are attempting to work with organizations that are on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. "They are," Denniston writes, "the Kurdistan Workers'; Party and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Those two groups, the brief said, ‘engage in a wide range of lawful, nonviolent activity,' and the groups and individuals in the case ‘seek to further only such activity.'"

Ahilan T. Arulanantham, an attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, says that a frequently overlooked consequence of the "material support" provision of the Patriot Act is its effect on the rendering of humanitarian aid in certain parts of the world. 

In an Issue Brief released by ACS, Arulanantham maintains:

The current material support statute, with its limited exceptions and extremely broad intent requirement, leads to truly irrational results. A humanitarian organization may send medicine to perform dialysis, but risks prosecution if it also seeks to send either the doctor or the equipment needed to perform the dialysis itself. Surely we do not enhance our nation's security by enacting statutes that lead to such absurd, and cruel, results.