It's Free Speech v. 'Material Support' for Terrorism at High Court This Week
Photo by Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty images
Ralph Fertig believes in peaceful social advocacy—and he has the scars to prove it.
In 1961, he was a young social worker in Chicago when he journeyed to Alabama and rode with the Freedom Riders to integrate the interstate buses. He was arrested and beaten in a Selma jail, leaving him with broken ribs, but he calls it “one of the proudest moments of my life.”
To his surprise, however, he has been caught in a long legal fight with the U.S. government over whether he can engage in peaceful advocacy in this country for another aggrieved minority: the Kurds in southeastern Turkey.
This time, Fertig’s efforts have spawned the U.S. Supreme Court’s first major test of whether the war on terrorism conflicts with the free speech principles of the First Amendment. As the government’s lawyers see it, Fertig’s advocacy for the Kurds could amount to “material support” for terrorism, a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
“I am opposed to violence of all sorts. It seems crazy to me that I could go to jail for trying to persuade people to use nonviolent means to achieve their rights,” says Fertig, now 79 and president of the Los Angeles-based Humanitarian Law Project, a nonprofit human rights organization begun in 1985. The case, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, is scheduled for oral argument on Feb. 23.
Continue reading “A Touch of Terror?” online now in the February ABA Journal.
