By Ranjit J. Perera

America’s highest court this week declared that support extended to groups designated “foreign terrorist organizations” such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) would be a violation of the country’s anti-terror law. According to the Supreme Court, the law does not violate the First and Fifth Amendment rights (free speech and due process) of U.S. citizens.

“We hold that, in regulating the particular forms of support that plaintiffs seek to provide to foreign terrorist organizations, Congress has pursued that objective consistent with the limitations of the First and Fifth Amendments,” the Court declared in its judgment.

The Court also upheld the law prohibiting material support in the form of “humanitarian assistance to persons not directly involved in terrorist activity.”

“The PKK [Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan] and the LTTE are deadly groups,” the Court stated in its judgment. “The PKK’s insurgency has claimed more than 22,000 lives. The LTTE has engaged in extensive suicide bombings and political assassinations, including killings of the Sri Lankan president, security minister, and deputy defense minister.”

“On Jan. 31, 1996, the LTTE exploded a truck bomb filled with an estimated 1,000 pounds of explosives at the Central Bank in Colombo, killing 100 people and injuring more than 1,400,” the ruling continued. “This bombing was the most deadly terrorist incident in the world in 1996.”

“It is not difficult to conclude as Congress did, that the (taint) of such violent activities is so great that working in coordination with or at the command of the PKK and LTTE serves to legitimize and further their terrorist means,” the Court added.

The Court stated that terrorism can be promoted in multiple ways with “material support” meant to “(promote) peaceable, lawful conduct.”

“Indeed, some designated foreign terrorist organizations use social and political components to recruit personnel to carry out terrorist operations, and to provide support to criminal terrorists and their families in aid of such operations,” the Court said, justifying its decision.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the judgment after a 6 to 3 vote to uphold the federal law. The decision followed 12 years of litigation during which the Humanitarian Law Project and others sought to provide “material support” to two organizations, the PKK and the LTTE, “to facilitate only the lawful, non-violent purposes of those groups,” contending that applying the material-support law to prevent them from doing so violates the Constitution.

Photo Credit: Franz Jantzen (www.supremecourt.gov)

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