Egypt Right Here in America

The world has watched, spellbound, over the past few weeks as North Africans have taken to the streets to oust authoritarian and arbitrary regimes. But the recent unrest also provides an unfortunate reminder of the arbitrary and authoritarian treatment to which immigrants, even documented, are subject right here in America. The story of Samaa Kerba (pictured left), a lawful permanent resident who tried to return to the United States from Egypt with her 4-year old US citizen son last weekend offers insight into the excessive discretion placed in the hands of the government officials assessing the national security threat posed by non-citizens (as I've described in more detail here).
Kerba, who sought to return to her home in Los Angeles to flee the turmoil in Egypt, was stopped in transit in Amsterdam last Thursday, presumably because she had been placed on the FBI's No Fly List. An airline official told her "America does not want you to get on this flight. You can't enter the plane." When they told Kerba she and her son would be sent back to Cairo, she contacted the ACLU. Ahilan Arulanantham, who directs the immigrants' rights and national security program at the ACLU of Southern California, filed a temporary restraining order on her behalf, arguing that the government's actions violated both the immigration statute and the Due Process Clause. By the end of the day, the government agreed to let Kerba return to Los Angeles.
The government did not tell Kerba why she was on the No Fly List. She and her lawyers assume that it is because of her now deceased husband, Daniel Abdullah, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen. Kerba became estranged from Abdullah in late 2009 after Abdullah travelled to Somalia to further his religious education. Kerba, who did not agree with Abdullah's decision, had limited contact with her husband afterwards. Abdullah was killed in Somalia last November, but the FBI continues to question Kerba at airports about her husband, most recently at Los Angeles International Airport upon her return last Saturday.
Kerba was lucky in that her lawyer was able to mount a speedy and successful challenge that enabled her to return to the US immediately. Unfortunately, that's not the case for many immigrants in her situation. In a recent example, in the UK last month, a Border Agency official was sacked for adding his wife's name to a list of terrorist suspects. After a trip to Pakistan to visit family, his wife was unable to return to the UK for three years. The dangerous combination of heightened discretion in the hands of government officials and minimal political power in the hands of non-citizens has led time and time again to such abuses in the United States and beyond. As I've written before, human rights law and standards should be incorporated into these processes to create an institutional culture that more appropriately balances national security and due process concerns. Until then, we'll have our own sphere of authoritarianism and arbitrariness, our own little bit of Egypt right here in America.

(credit to Ana P. Gutierrez, for the Orange County Register, for the photo of Samaa Kerba)

Speaking (Soft) Law to Power

Just in time for the one-year anniversary of the Haitian earthquake, and just when the cholera crisis made one think that life could not get any worse for the Haitians, the Department of Homeland Security is planning to resume deportations of Haitians with criminal convictions. Yesterday, several immigrants' rights and civil rights groups including the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, and the human rights and immigration clinics at the University of Miami (the former run by guest/alumna Carrie Bettinger-Lopez) filed a petition for precautionary measures with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, asking that it prevent the United States from resuming deportations to Haiti.
Though the petition is long, it's worth a read if only just for the brief but devastating portrait of U.S. policy towards Haitian immigrants since the early 1960s. The stories of the named petitioners in the case demonstrate the ongoing cruelty of our immigration laws. None of the petitioners have been convicted of violent crimes; one is being deported for two counts of drug possession with intent to sell, for which he was sentenced to six months in prison. All face likely imprisonment upon arrival in Haiti simply for the fact of being criminal deportees from the United States. All have lived in the United States for at least a decade and have significant family ties with U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Most were permanent residents themselves before removal proceedings were initiated against them. None have close relatives in Haiti who survived the earthquake, and as a result will have nobody to bring them food and water in prison or advocate for their release.
An older petitioner who suffers from serious medical conditions has not received proper medical care in immigration detention in the United States; one can only imagine what will happen to him in Haiti. A younger petitioner has a 6-year old U.S. citizen son who suffers from a serious medical condition that has worsened since his father has been detained. Another is the sole financial provider for his four U.S. citizen and permanent resident children. Approximately 350 Haitians are in the immigration detention system; 100 were transferred to Louisiana in mid-December to await deportation to Haiti.
The petition alleges violations of five provisions of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (sic). The deportation of these Haitians abrogates their right to life given the inhumane prison conditions they will face at home, particularly during the cholera epidemic, which has hit prisons particularly hard. Their removal also breaches their right to freedom from cruel, infamous, or unusual punishments due to the severe lack of medical care and social services in post-earthquake Haiti. The arbitrary detention these criminal deportees will face upon return violates their right to security of person. The petition also argues that the failure of the U.S. immigration system to offer a humanitarian defense to deportation, either by measuring the impact of removal on U.S. citizen family members or assessing the gravity of conditions in their home country violates the Haitians' right to family life and their right to due process and a fair trial.
Though aspirational in nature, the Inter-American Court and Commission on Human Rights have held the American Declaration's obligations to be binding on members of the Organization for American States, an approach necessitated by the United States' failure to ratify the American Convention on Human Rights (as always, in good company, alongside Cuba). Given the dearth of domestic options to appeal or even obtain information about ICE's deportation policies, and given the Inter-American Commission's recent decision finding that some aspects of U.S. immigration law violate the American Declaration, the Commission seems a wise choice of forum. But even if the Commission finds in favor of the petitioners, will the U.S. follow its precautionary measures? Unlike the Medellin case, here the execution of the orders in question lies in the hands of the federal government. And despite the recent shellacking, it remains a Democratic administration, one that will hopefully be willing to engage the human rights issues at stake.

Tearing Apart Immigrant Families

As many of us prepare to reunite with our families over the holidays, the Women's Refugee Commission has released a new report, Torn Apart by Immigration Enforcement: Parental Rights and Immigration Detention, that describes the horrific consequences of the interaction of the immigration enforcement and child welfare systems in the United States.
While hard data are difficult to come by, there are at least three million children living in mixed families in the United States -- that is, families with a US citizen child and an undocumented parent. Between 1998 and 2007, over 100,000 non-citizen parents of US citizen children were deported. For some, this results in painful decisions about whether to leave the child in the US or bring the child with them. But those are the lucky families; many parents do not ever even get this choice. In the worst cases, undocumented immigrants' parental rights are terminated without their knowledge.
The report breaks down the problem into several stages. To start, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) apprehend undocumented immigrants, their protocols are insufficient to identify parents and prioritize them for release. Indeed, the guidance for agents who encounter juveniles during fugitive operations directs officers to contact child welfare services, which can complicate parents rights. In any case, there are no procedures to ensure that parents can make care arrangements for their children before they are detained.
Once undocumented parents are detained, it becomes extremely difficult to communicate with their children and the child welfare system due to limitations on telephone access and frequent distant transfers of immigration detainees. Not only does this pose serious obstacles to ensuring safe care for immigrants' children, it may contribute directly to termination of parental rights. For example, the child welfare system's family reunification plan may require regular phone calls and contact visits that are all but impossible for detained parents. Detained parents are also often unable to participate in family court proceedings, either because child welfare services cannot locate them so they do not receive notice of the hearing or because they are unable to be present at the hearing.
Finally, when undocumented parents are deported, the dearth of information provided by ICE about the timing of deportation can make reunification very difficult. Parents are often notified of their deportation at the very last minute -- too late to make travel arrangements for their children -- or ICE changes travel plans after parents have already purchased expensive, nonrefundable tickets for their children to accompany them. This and the other failures of coordination between immigration and child welfare systems described above result in the long-term and in some cases permanent separation of families, inflicting serious psychological trauma on the citizen children of undocumented immigrants.

(Hat tip to my student, Jessica Jones, who worked on the Women's Refugee Commission report this summer and is currently writing a research paper on the interaction of the child welfare and immigration enforcement systems under my supervision.)

On the Job! Migrant children

(On the Job! pays occasional notice to interesting intlaw job notices)

The decade-old Detained Immigrant and Refugee Children's Initiative of the Florence Project is seeking a staff attorney. (hat tip)

The staff attorney, who must be fluent in Spanish, will advocate for unaccompanied immigrant minors who are in removal proceedings and in U.S. immigration custody, in contract shelters or foster care in Phoenix. The position is based in Phoenix.
The staff attorney will be part of a 5-member team that gives "know your rights" presentations at shelters, conducts intake and pre-court counseling sessions, and affords representation at various legal forums. The position includes extensive client contact with children from diverse backgrounds, including indigenous children and children who have suffered abuse, abandonment, neglect or other emotional and physical trauma.

Application details here.

Arrests of Guatemalans in U.S. accused of massacre: beginning of a new trend?

Yesterday the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Justice Department announced that they had arrested Gilberto Jordán, a former member of an elite army unit known as kaibiles, for lying on his immigration forms about his participation in a 1982 massacre. Two more former officials had also settled in the U.S. and are being sought. A fourth man, Santos Lopez Alonzo, pled guilty to illegally entering the country; he was fined $10 and is due to be deported.
The massacre, in a remote northern village known as the Dos Erres, was part of a campaign by the army against perceived opposition to military rule. While most of the victims of the military campaigns were Mayan, Dos Erres was a mixed settlement of recent immigrants to the zone. They had left insufficient land plots in the highlands to move to a settlement on the agricultural frontier, but in December 1982 they were targeted as potential guerrilla sympathizers. The army surrounded the town, rounded up the townspeople and divided them into groups of men and women. As Gilberto Jordán admitted to the authorities, he started the killing by throwing a baby down the town well, still alive. Next the women were raped, killed and thrown down the well, followed by the men. In all, there were 251 villagers killed. (credit for photo above right of clothing of children killed in the Dos Erres massacre)
Jordán had been living in the U.S. since 1999, and had become a naturalized citizen without mentioning his participation in the massacre in his application. The other two suspects are Jorge Vinicio Sosa-Orantes of Riverside, California, and Pedro Pimentel-Rios of Santa Ana, California. Sosa-Orantes was a lieutenant at the time. In the U.S. he worked as a martial arts instructor. Pimentel-Rios, accused by witnesses of raping young girls before killing them, moved to the U.S. after a career that included a stint at the U.S. School of the Americas. More on the defendants can be found here. The Dos Erres massacre has become an emblematic case of Guatemala’s culture of impunity. It’s not that there’s a lack of evidence: two other elite soldiers confessed and provided eyewitness evidence in the case, and one survivor who, at age 5, witnessed his family’s murder before being taken as a domestic slave by López Alonzo. That man, Ramiro Cristales, has agreed to testify in the case and, along with the repentant soldiers, is now in hiding. The problem is that the case has languished in the Guatemalan courts for years. Every time there was any movement, lawyers for the defendants would file motions, called amparos, that had the effect of paralyzing the proceedings. One of the claims was that the case was covered by the country’s 1996 amnesty law.
Fed up, lawyers for family members of those killed went to the Inter-American Commission for help. The Commission found that Guatemala had violated the rights of the victims to redress and judicial process, and the Court, in 2010, agreed. It ordered the Guatemalan state to quit stalling and remove legal obstacles to prosecution, and to press forward with exhumations of the remains of the dead and other pre-trial procedures. In February, 2010, the Guatemalan Supreme Court held that the amnesty law did not apply, and that the lower courts should refuse to countenance any more dilatory motions and should get on with the business of amassing evidence and hearing the case. Since then, the Prosecutors’ office has announced that it is moving forward on the case, although a highly-contested process for election of the chief prosecutor may complicate things.
In this context, U.S. authorities have a number of choices for dealing with those arrested. They could, as is usually the case when those suspected of war crimes, torture, genocide or crimes against humanity, simply deport those who are non-citizens back to Guatemala. Unless such deportations are coordinated carefully with the Guatemalan prosecutors’ office so that the suspects are detained on arrival in Guatemala, however, deportation is simply a get out of jail card, as the suspects will disappear and never be tried. This has been the unfortunate outcome in the past. Or they could arrange for deportations to be carefully coordinated and get assurances from Guatemalan prosecutors that they will take over prosecution under international standards. Another option, especially for naturalized U.S. citizens, is to charge them with visa fraud for non-disclosure of their actions. This carries a potential ten-year prison term, at which point they could be deported back to Guatemala. This provision is already being used to strip former Salvadoran Defense Minister Garcia of his citizenship. While not ideal in terms of either the symbolic value or the length of sentence, fraud charges are no doubt easier to prove and less fraught than the underlying crimes.
Finally, U.S. authorities could charge the suspects with the underlying crimes and try them here. U.S. law provides jurisdiction for torture, genocide, slavery or recruitment of child soldiers when the offender is found in the U.S., no matter what his nationality or where the crime occurred. The section on torture was used to prosecute “Chuckie” Taylor, former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s son, who in 2009 was convicted and sentenced to 97 years in prison. It has not been more widely used because prosecutors have been loath to take on cases where the acts occurred prior to 1994, when the statute was enacted. As a matter of international law, this interpretation is incorrect: according to Article 15 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, there is no ex post facto problem when the behavior at issue has been criminalized in national or international law. Genocide, slavery and systematic torture have long been recognized as international crimes.
At this point, whether trial in Guatemala or in the U.S. is the best alternative depends on how seriously the Guatemalan prosecutors’ office seems to be in matching actions to their professed intentions to prosecute the case at home. The U.S. should not give up the suspects without negotiating serious guarantees that they won’t just be mysteriously “sprung” from a local jail. If the choice is to prosecute here for visa fraud, U.S. authorities should seek ways to put the underlying facts of the massacre before the court, and to allow massacre victims some degree of participation and observance of the proceedings. The U.S. should also seek to collaborate with the Spanish judicial authorities, who are investigating the related case of genocide in the Spanish courts. Information and witness sharing, especially about military methods, training and objectives, could be useful in both cases. The Dos Erres case could become a symbol not only of horror, but of international prosecutorial and judicial cooperation and of a real commitment to finally make the U.S. “no safe haven” for war criminals.

Maria's Choice

I've been haunted all week by an immigration horror story. Maria is an undocumented immigrant living in the United States. She has five children, and as a single mother, works hard to support them. Last week, Maria learned that her oldest child, Jose, who is also undocumented, was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and placed in detention. Jose is eligible for release from detention, but ICE informed Maria's lawyer that they will release him only to the custodial parent, which in this case is only Maria. But if Maria goes in to let her child out of jail, ICE will arrest her and place her in removal proceedings, leaving her other four children without a parent. ICE tells her lawyer that this is their policy, and they've no discretion to act otherwise.
This lack of discretion is key to the overloaded immigration courts and burgeoning immigration detention system. Over the past decade and a half since the 1996 immigration reform act, prosecutorial discretion in immigration cases has been on the wane. As a result, immigration courts have been swamped with cases. And in 2010, for the first time, the detained docket in immigration court will exceed the non-detained docket. In other words, most of the immigrants in removal proceedings will be locked up. It is of course an impossible task to catch, detain, and remove all of the undocumented immigrants in the country, and it makes no sense to jail those who pose no threat to society -- unless you're a state that receives federal funds to do so. But from a humanitarian perspective, the cost to individuals and families is simply too high.
International human rights law, drafted by sovereigns with an interest in controlling their borders, is less protective than one might hope of the rights of undocumented immigrants. As I've blogged before, home states can play an important role in protecting their citizens abroad; moreover, the humanitarian spirit of human rights law can and should animate interpretations of domestic immigration law. In any case, it doesn't take a moral philosopher to understand the problems with our current treatment of the undocumented population within our borders. It's imperative that Congress and the Obama Administration, particularly Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, enable the principled and humane exercise of prosecutorial discretion in immigration cases before we become a police state that would make Eichmann proud.

Reforming Immigration Detention

On Tuesday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano released a report by Dr. Dora Schriro (about whom I've posted here) describing and recommending reform of the United States' immigration detention programs-- just a month after Schriro announced that she would step down as the Department of Homeland Security's Director of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning. The result of an intensive eight-month study of the system, the report is transparent, thorough, and sensible, which might seem baselines for government operations, but represent an enormous step forward for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). While I would still quarrel with the decision to detain many of the immigrant groups described in the report, its recommendations are a vast improvement on what's come before, and underline the urgent importance of naming Schriro's replacement.
Despite its measured tone, the report is littered with stunning facts and statistics that illustrate the gravity of the flaws of the immigration detention system. For starters, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), responsible for enforcing civil immigration law, operates the largest detention system in the country. In FY 2008, ICE detained nearly380,000 non-citizens, almost 90% of whom came from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. ICE holds 50% of the detained immigrant population in county jails alongside criminal detainees, but does not require these county jails to uphold national detention standards. The detained immigrant population includes non-criminal asylum seekers, 1400 of whom are jailed daily. ICE outsources not only detention but also monitoring and evaluation functions, which were performed primarily by the private sector at a cost of $31 million in FY 2009. One might think that such a delegation of authority would include written policies and procedures or technical manuals specific to detention -- but ICE has failed to create any such written guidance. The existing detention standards are based on criminal incarceration, so are more costly and restrictive than necessary for non-criminal populations. It is not a surprise but still a shame to learn that officials in the Office of Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) are primarily law enforcement personnel who hold limited expertise in design and delivery of detention facilities and alternatives to detention.
The report offers five main recommendations, which again illustrate the fundamental nature of the problems of immigration detention. These may still be challenging to implement in a dysfunctional bureaucracy, especially if the position of Director of DRO is filled by a less capable hand than Schriro. The first recommendation is that detention be consistent with assessed risk, requiring a step rarely taken -- for ICE to ascertain non-citizens' propensity for violence and likelihood of absconding. Second, Schriro's report recommends that DRO assess and respond to detainee's needs, such as medical care, legal materials, visitation, and religious practice, paying particular attention to special populations such as women, families with children, and asylum seekers. Third, the report suggests that DRO implement clear standards of medical care, including thorough initial assessments, monitoring, and ongoing management. Fourth, the report recommends federal oversight of key detention operations, including tracking performance and outcomes, placing federal officials on-site, and ensuring accessible and effective grievance and disciplinary processes. Finally, Schriro suggests that DRO implement the simplest of reporting systems, including a daily count of all detainees and a list of detention facilities. Just these basic changes could represent an enormous improvement in the lives of thousands of immigrants every year, and may well be more cost-effective than the current system (though we await the report's recommended comprehensive analysis of detention costs, including evaluations of less restrictive detention and alternatives to detention, for the final word on that front). If non-criminal immigrants are to be detained at all, the report offers a far more humane approach than today's detention system, but one that will require tremendous shifts in culture and competence at DHS.

The Next Best Thing

On July 23, 2002, in the courtroom of Judge Daniel T.K. Hurley, a South Florida jury returned a $ 54.6 million verdict, encompassing punitive and compensatory damages, in favor of three Salvadoran survivors of torture. The case, Romagoza v. Garcia, was brought by the Center for Justice & Accountability on behalf of three Salvadoran refugees--Dr. Juan Romagoza, Professor Carlos Mauricio, and Neris Gonzalez (Mauricio & Gonzalez are pictured at left)--against two former ministers of defense of El Salvador: Jose Guillermo Garcia (below right) and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova.
The verdict heralded a major victory in the worldwide fight against impunity for human rights violations. Most significantly, the case was one of the first Alien Tort Statute cases in which defendant commanders, fully contesting the allegations and testifying in their own defense, were held liable for human rights violations exclusively under the doctrine of command responsibility.

Another case in which the plaintiffs relied solely on the doctrine of command responsibility, Ford v. Garcia, was brought in the same courtroom against the same two generals by families of the four United States churchwomen who were raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran National Guard in 1980. In November 2000, a jury rendered a verdict in the Ford case that the generals could not be held liable for the crimes, apparently because the jury was not satisfied that the two generals had "effective control" over their subordinates. (See a prior post on the Ford case here). Both cases are the subject of a PBS film, Justice & the Generals.

The Romagoza plaintiffs managed to recover a couple hundred thousand dollars from an investment account held in Vides Casanova's name. The rest of their judgment, however, remains unexecuted as no other assets have been found. Thanks to Florida homestead laws and other legal barriers, General Garcia has never paid a penny of the judgment against him.
Garcia may not be enjoying his Florida retirement for long.

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, R. Alexander Acosta (right), and Anthony V. Mangione, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Office of Investigations, Miami Field Office (ICE), recently unsealed a two-count indictment against Garcia. Unfortunately, Garcia is not being charged with torture under 18 U.S.C. § 2340, a statutory provision enacted in the wake of the United States' ratification of the Torture Convention, but well after the civil war in El Salvador. Rather, Al Capone-style, the Indictment charges Garcia with
► using a passport procured by false statement, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1546(a), and
► making a materially false statement to a federal officer, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2).

According to the press release accompanying the indictment:

The defendant used an El Salvadoran passport at Miami International Airport on July 7, 2006 in an attempt to enter the United States. The defendant had obtained the passport after falsely telling the Government of El Salvador that he had lost his previously issued passport. In fact, however, his prior passport had not been lost, but had been seized by United States immigration authorities.

In addition, the Indictment alleges that on the same day, July 7, 2006, the defendant falsely stated to United States immigration authorities at Miami International Airport that he had obtained the second El Salvadoran passport after his attorney had told him that his first passport, which had been seized by U.S. immigration authorities, had been lost by those authorities. According to the defendant, his attorney had told him that because the immigration authorities had lost the passport they had seized from him, it was permissible for him to obtain a new passport to travel to El Salvador. The Indictment alleges that the defendant knew this statement was false.

The case will be heard by U.S. District Court Judge Patricia Seitz. The charges carry maximum penalties of ten years’ imprisonment (using a passport procured by false statement) and five years’ imprisonment (making a materially false statement to a federal officer).

The Impact of Terrorism on World Trade

Part 2 of a 2-part series

After four years of silence, last week Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, gave his first interview since being placed under house arrest. A now unrepentant Khan repudiates the televised tearful confession he made back in 2004 in which he admitted to smuggling nuclear equipment and technology in shipping containers to such states as to Libya, Iran and North Korea. The resurrection of Abdul Qadeer Khan from obscurity raises anew the question of how safe is the world's trade supply chain--and specifically shipping containers--against a determined terrorist?

In my last post, I introduced the Container Security Initiative--U.S. Customs' response to the threat that a shipping container could be used by terrorists to transport a nuclear bomb to the United States. CSI is meant to "extend [the United States'] zone of security outward," by stationing U.S. Customs agents in ports all over the world (with consent of the host) where they can work with officials to identify suspect containers and inspect them before they ever arrive on U.S. shores. Opting to implement the program in three stages, Customs initially excluded from CSI membership all but the top twenty "megaports" —those ports that send the largest volume of container traffic to the United States. In Phase II of the project, ports of political or strategic significance can join, provided they meet certain criteria. Only in Phase III will ports that require technical assistance and capacity building—those ports in developing countries—be considered for CSI membership. The net result was that for years, only European and a few Asian ports were CSI-certified. Only recently have ports in Africa (South Africa was the first), the Caribbean and Latin America been added to the program. (map credit)

Membership in CSI comes with significant benefits. The idea is that containers arriving from CSI ports are deemed "safe" and ordinarily will not be subject to additional inspection in the United States. They receive "head of the line" privileges. Moreover, if the unthinkable happened and the nation's seaports were closed because of a terrorist threat, CSI-containers would again receive preferential treatment once normal business resumed.

The problem with CSI first and foremost is that the U.S. government itself acknowledges the nuke-in-the-box scenario, around which CSI is designed, is unlikely to occur. A report by the Government Accountability Office found "the likelihood of containers being used to move WMDs to the United States is low." Given that reality, it seems difficult to justify a measure that so significantly changes the trading system to the detriment of developing countries. By delaying admission of developing countries in the program until the last stage, Customs has created disincentives for businesses to source their supply from those countries. For a company, the risk of sourcing goods from a country without a CSI-certified port may be too great given the potential for such goods to stagnate at a U.S. border awaiting inspection (even a single day’s delay at Customs adds almost 1% to the cost of goods).

In a much longer piece on this question, I argue CSI violates World Trade Organization rules because it provides a benefit to some members and not other, which is contrary to the most-favored-nation requirement of GATT Article I. Although GATT Article XXI provides a general exception for national security reasons, I argue the national security exception must be read in light of a "development dimension." In other words, even as rich countries take measures to respond to terrorism and other security concerns, they must still consider the impact such measures are likely to have on developing countries.
The truth is, we cannot ensure our security without ensuring the security of others. It is far better to create a system where we raise world standards on security without relegating developing countries once again to the periphery.

In closing, I wanted to let the IntLawGrrls community know I recently launched my own all-trade-all-the-time website to talk about free trade related issues in a balanced, smart and fair way. I look forward to a long and active run with this blog, but the website gives me the opportunity to write on some of these issues in much greater depth (although not as deep as a law review article!) Check it out at http://www.tradevoices.com/

(Cross posted at Conglomerate, a business-law-economics-society blog)