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Restrictions on Scholarly Editing Dropped
By Wendi Maloney
Last December, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a general license authorizing U.S. publishers to edit texts from authors in Cuba, Iran, and Sudan. OFAC is a section of the U.S. Treasury Department charged with administering trade sanctions imposed on countries judged by the president to be national security threats. Cuba, Iran, and Sudan are under sanction, and the embargoes against them had been interpreted as barring scholarly collaboration with authors living in those countries.
This latest decision overrides rulings by OFAC in 2003 and 2004 that widely alarmed groups committed to the open exchange of ideas and scholarship, including the AAUP. In 2003, in response to an inquiry from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers about its publishing program, OFAC ruled that the institute need not apply for a license to engage in its standard peer review process, but it maintained that editing of work from sanctioned countries still required a license under the theory that such editing provides a valuable service to authors in those countries. After the institute sent OFAC further information about its editing procedures, OFAC ruled in April 2004 that the organization could engage in eight categories of allowable alterations. Any editing that exceeded those categories—such as the reordering of sentences or replacement of inappropriate words—still required a license.
Following this ruling, nine organizations of writers, First Amendment advocates, and scholars, including the AAUP, issued a statement deploring "this threat to the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of thought, inquiry, speech, and publication." In fall 2004, four publishers' groups filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging OFAC's authority over publishing.
Following OFAC's decision to eliminate the requirement that publishers apply for licenses to edit authors from sanctioned countries, Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, commented, "OFAC's previous guidance was interpreted by some as discouraging the publication of dissident speech from within these oppressive regimes. That is the opposite of what we want. This new policy will ensure those dissident voices and others will be heard without undermining our sanctions policy."
Publishers reportedly consider the decision a major victory. Representative Howard Berman of California, author of an amendment passed by Congress in 1988 exempting "information or information materials" from economic embargoes, is less sanguine. He cautioned that the new regulations "continue to represent that the government has the inherent legal authority to regulate these activities. . . . This violates both the letter and spirit of my amendment, which has been the law of the land since 1988."
"The AAUP welcomes the Treasury Department's recognition that restricting scholarly exchanges does not contribute to international security," says AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen. "But we still oppose the notion that the federal government has any right to regulate the exchange of information between individuals in two countries, even by granting a 'general license.' Congress has spoken on this matter: information and information materials are exempt from trade embargo laws."
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