NEW YORK: From Washington comes proof that high-profile individuals can sometimes force the Bush administration to reverse policies that violate human rights.

The person in question is Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian dissident who was the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Prize. This is the story of how she and her colleagues got the US Treasury Department to stop seeing her book as "enemy" literature.

Ebadi was told she could not publish her memoirs in the United States because of regulations that prohibit "trading with the enemy." The Trading With The Enemy Act (TWTE), passed in 1917, allows the president to bar transactions during times of war or national emergency.

Though the law has been amended to exempt publishers, the Treasury Department continued to rule it illegal "to enhance the value of anything created in Iran without permission," including books.

The department suggested Ebadi apply for a special license. But instead, she and her agent joined a lawsuit filed a month earlier against Treasury by several US organizations representing publishers, editors and translators.

For more than a year these groups had conducted fruitless negations with the department's office of foreign assets control (OFAC), which administers the TWTE regulations that currently apply to countries against which Washington has sanctions - Iran, Sudan and Cuba.

Ebadi's book is described as an effort to "help correct western stereotypes of Islam, especially the image of Muslim women as docile, forlorn creatures." According to the lawsuit, "At a time when the US calls for citizens of other countries to follow the example of American democracy, preventing writers in certain countries from reaching the American public sends exactly the wrong message."

"Writers in Iran, Cuba and Sudan cannot publish freely in their own countries. It is a tragic and dangerous irony that Americans may not freely publish the works of those writers here, either," it continues.

The suit was filed by the PEN American Centre, the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing division (AAP/PSP), the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), and Arcade Publishing.

"We seek to overturn the regulations on what Americans can and cannot read in the United States," Ebadi wrote in 'The New York Times' on Nov 16. According to Ebadi, human rights, "including the freedom to read whatever one wishes, are universal values that transcend national boundaries.

Therefore, just as I take on court cases in Tehran to defend others' rights, so must I follow my conscience and take on a lawsuit in the United States to defend my own rights and the rights of Americans."

The lawsuit asked the court to strike down OFAC regulations that require publishers, writers and translators to seek a license from the government to perform the routine services necessary to publish foreign literature in the United States.

Ebadi and her colleagues charged those rules violate both the intention of Congress, articulated in the 1989 Berman Amendment, and the 1994 Free Trade in Ideas Act, which exempts transactions involving "information and informational materials" from embargoed countries, as well as the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

Last week, the Treasury Department abruptly reversed its interpretation of the TWTE Act and largely exempted writers, publishers, editors, translators and literary agents from rules on the publication of information materials - including medical and scientific publications as well as books - from countries subject to US trade embargoes. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service