Live Seminar 25: Criminalizing Humanitarian Engagement? Counterterror Legislation and Humanitarian Action

Summary: In this week's live seminar, our panelists examined how recent legal and policy trends—punctuated by a June 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision—may alter modalities of humanitarian engagement with non-state armed groups. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a law criminalizing various forms of “material support” to prohibited groups. The discussion was moderated by Claude Bruderlein and Naz Modirzadeh. Panelists included: Professor David Cole (Georgetown University Law Center), Gabor Rona (Human Rights First) and Kenneth Wainstein (O'Melveny, Myers LLP, Former Homeland Security Advisor).