(From the Wall Street Journal) A New York man filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging the U.S. government’s restrictions on spending by American citizens and permanent residents while traveling to Cuba.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, alleges Zachary Sanders was fined after he failed to respond to a March 2000 request by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for information on an alleged June 1998 trip to Cuba and travel while he was there.
The complaint claims that people who respond to OFAC’s request 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.
An administrative law judge recommended Sanders be fined $1,000 in 2008, according to the lawsuit. OFAC had proposed a fine as large as $10,000.
OFAC appealed the judge’s ruling and a designee for then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson affirmed the penalty and increased it to $9,000 on Jan. 16, the Bush administration’s last day in office, according to the lawsuit.
The complaint, filed on behalf of Sanders by the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, is seeking 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.
From the blogger: Good luck to Tim Geithner in trying to defend a policy that has an increasing number of domestic opponents. And if he fails, what will it mean? Will a New York District Court begin the process of unraveling the years of embargo? Long live the separation of powers and checks and balances!
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HAVANA TIMES, July 18 - The US Center for Constitutional Rights presented a lawsuit before a Federal Court in New York questioning the US government policy that forces people to report on their expenditures when they travel to Cuba, reported IPS.
The disclosure requirement is one of the ways that the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) enforces the decades old travel ban that prohibits -under threat of heavy fines- ordinary US citizens from visiting neighboring Cuba and spending money there.
The travel ban has been around since 1962 except for a brief lapse during the Carter administration (1977-1980). Today, Cuba is the only country in the world off-bounds for US citizens.
US House of Representatives legislation (HR 874) would end the travel ban completely freeing US citizens to travel to the island. It currently has 160 co-sponsors but has yet to make it out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
President Obama has not indicated whether he would sign the bill if it was to pass in the House and Senate, or take the Bush administration’s veto approach to squash it.
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