Georgetown Law Center professor David Cole and the Humanitarian Law Project will challenge a provision of the USA Patriot Act that bans providing “expert advice and assistance” to organizations that the government has deemed to have connections with terrorism.

Cole and Nancy Chang, senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, will represent four Tamil organizations and a Tamil-American doctor who said he hopes to improve the medical infrastructure of Sri Lanka’s war-torn countryside.

Tamils are an ethnic group that live in southern India and Sri Lanka and comprise about 18 percent of Sri Lanka’s population.

Dr. Nagalingam Jeyalingam said that the Patriot Act bars him and his colleagues from providing professional expertise to the humanitarian portion of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the Tamil Tigers.

The Tamil Tigers, a Sri Lankan separatist group that has been fighting against the Sri Lankan government to gain independence, has been designated a terrorist group by the State Department.

Cole believes that the Patriot Act has stamped out humanitarian aid and threatens the First Amendment principle of free association.

“These groups have been providing support for various humanitarian activities and training in human rights, they have sought to encourage nonviolent alternatives,” Cole said. “I fail to see how supporting human rights training should be illegal.”

The Patriot Act was passed after Sept. 11, 2001, to ensure the safety of American citizens from terrorist threats and have been criticized heavily by civil rights organizations.

Cole points to provisions in the Patriot Act that reinforce restrictions on material support of alleged terrorist groups under “The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996,” which made it a crime to provide material support to any organization designated by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization. The Patriot Act amended the definition of material support to include “expert advice and assistance.”

The plaintiff’s case follows a previous suit filed in arch 1998 which argued that the 1996 act violated the First Amendment. Judge Audrey Collins, who presided over the case, held that the provision did not infringe on the First Amendment by forbidding cash, but conceded that it did not specify whether providing human resources could also be criminalized.

Collins then issued an injunction that barred the government from prosecuting plaintiffs. The case went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in March 2000, which upheld the previous ruling. The current challenge appeals the previous decision.

In the proceedings, the government has argued that material support for the Tamil Tigers could be used to fund or free up resources for terrorism.

Cole argues that the government could construe the law to prosecute anyone who has supported any organization that has been involved in illegal activities.

“The constitution says that you cannot support a group with the specific attempt to further illegal ends. But you cannot be punished for supporting lawful ends,” Cole said. “Under this law tens of thousands would be under prosecution for supporting the African National Conference since it engaged in violence … but it also engaged in lawful and peaceful actions.”

While conceding that material support could be used for terrorism, Cole said that safeguarding free association far outweighs this risk.

“There is always a risk, however, that that view [will] resurrect the principle of guilt by association … that view makes it permissible to prosecute donors to the Democratic party because it engaged in illegal acts in the past,” he said. “To punish someone for human rights training is to punish an innocent.”

Georgetown Law Center professor Viet Dinh, a former U.S. Assistant Attorney General for legal policy and a leading architect of the Patriot Act, sees the provision very differently, however.

“Blocking material support is one of the most important tools in our current war against terror. It is important that terrorists cannot rely on support from their sympathizers.”