Author, Lit Agency Challenge Treasury Regs

The Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, together with the Strothman Agency, filed a lawsuit last week against the U.S. Treasury Department, charging that the rules and regulations of its Office of Foreign Assets Control are preventing Ebadi from publishing her memoirs in the U.S. The OFAC regulations govern the amount of contact American companies can have with nations that are under the U.S. trade embargo, and a series of rulings have publishers concerned that any deals with people living in countries falling under the embargo will result in stiff fines. To roll back the recent decisions, a group of industry players filed their own suit against the Treasury Department in late September. The Ebadi lawsuit will be attached to the original suit.

Wendy Strothman, head of the Strothman Agency, said that while she is eager to work with Ebadi, whom she heard speak earlier this summer during a tour of the U.S., she will not sign the author until the questions concerning the OFAC restriction are resolved. Although Congress passed an amendment that excludes "informational materials" from sanctions, OFAC has made a number of rulings that have prohibited publishers from publishing materials by foreign writers. Strothman said it's a "terrible irony that people who have left Iran can have their voices heard, but those still there cannot."

In a prepared statement, the AAP, AAUP, PEN and Arcade Publishing (all plaintiffs in the first lawsuit) observed that "Ebadi's predicament provides a perfect illustration of the harm the OFAC regulations cause." Similar to the first lawsuit, the Ebadi complaint charges that the OFAC rulings violate the First Amendment and asks the court to grant a permanent injunction barring the enforcement of the rulings.