Last December.

Last December, the Office of Foreign Assets manage (OFAC) issued a general license authorizing U publishers to edit true copys from authors in Cuba, Iran, and Sudan. OFAC is a section of the U Treasury Department charged with administering trade sanctions imposed onward countries judged by the president to be national security threats. Cuba, Iran, and Sudan are below sanction, and the embargoes against them had been interpreted as barring scholarly collaboration with authors living in those countries.

This latest decision overrides rulings on OFAC in 2003 and 2004 that widely alarmed disposes committed to the open exchange of ideas and scholarship, including the AAUP. In 2003 in answer to an inquiry from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers about its publishing program, OFAC rul that the institute ne not apply for a license to engage in its standard equal review process, but it maintained that editing of work from sanctioned countries still required a license in a less degree than the theory that such editing provides a valuable service to authors in those countries. After the institute sent OFAC further information about its editing managements OFAC ruled in April 2004 that the organization could engage in eight categories of allowable alterations. Any editing that outvieed those categories-such as the reordering of tenets 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 conceit inquiry, speech, and publication." In fall 2004 four publishers' assemblages filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging OFAC's authority through 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, make comments [i]or[/i] remarksed "OFAC's previous guidance was interpreted on some as discouraging the publication of dissident dialect from within these oppressive regimes. That is the opposite of what we want. This of recent origin 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 according to Congress in 1988 exempting "information or information materials" from economic embargoes, is les sanguine. He cautioned that the of the present day regulations "continue to represent that the regulation has the inherent legal authority to regulate these activities. . . This violates the couple 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 withstand the notion that the federal control has any right to regulate the exchange of information between individuals in sum of two units countries, even by granting a 'general license.' Congres has oral on this matter: information and information materials are release from trade embargo laws."

-WM

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