Legal News

American Sanctioned By U.S. After Cuba Visit Files Suit

By Amir Efrati

The Law Blog has long wanted to sing “Guantanamera” on the shores of Havana. So we took notice when the Obama administration recently reversed course from prior administrations regarding our island neighbor to the south, Cuba, by easing travel restrictions for individuals who want to visit their relatives there.

It wasn’t so long ago, however, that the government apparently took a hard line against at least one illegal visitor.

In 1998, New Yorker Zachary Sanders took a trip to Cuba. Two years later, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces economic sanctions against countries such as Cuba and Iran, sent him a request for information about the trip, according to a story moved by Dow Jones Newswires’s Chad Bray. (Link unavailable.)

He didn’t respond, and OFAC allegedly got an administrative law judge to fine him $1,000 last year. (The agency had proposed a fine as large as $10,000.) OFAC appealed the judge’s ruling and on Jan. 16 of this year — the Bush administration’s last day — a designee for then-Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson allegedly affirmed the penalty and increased it to $9,000.

On Thursday Sanders filed suit in federal court in Brooklyn, challenging the U.S. government’s restrictions on spending by American citizens and permanent residents while traveling to Cuba. (Click here for the complaint.)

He makes an interesting argument by claiming people who respond to OFAC’s requests for information about their travels open themselves up for potential criminal sanctions.

”The penalty imposed against Mr. Sanders is unlawful because the Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from punishing failure to obey any regulation that requires a self-incriminating act,” the lawsuit said.

Representing Sanders: the left-leaning nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights. The suit seeks a declaration that OFAC’s policy is unlawful, enjoining OFAC from issuing such penalties and setting aside the fine to Sanders.

The lawsuit names Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as a defendant. The Treasury Department declined to comment.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 17, 2009 (boomark / email).