FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, June 4, 2004

Contact: John Farrell (Voices in The Wilderness) (773) 619-2418 (on site)
Carl Messineo (Partnership for Civil Justice) (202) 270-3531

(Washington, D.C.) At a court hearing today in the US District Court Building in Washington, D.C., Judge John D. Bates has given the US prosecution team two weeks to explain why it took 3 years and 11 months to initiate the $20,000.00 fine that the US Treasury Department had assessed onto Voices in The Wilderness (VitW) for “exporting medicines to Iraq.”

Judge Bates also questioned inconsistency around the economic sanctions statute that explicitly allows for the delivery of food and medicine to those suffering in Iraq. Ironically, this was the same regulation that comprised the main complaint found in the summons which ViTW received on July 29, 2003 from the US Department of Treasury, Office of Foreign Asset Control.