This post was updated Sept. 13 at 11:24 p.m.

Chancellor Julio Frenk on Friday condemned a School of Law symposium that included a defense attorney who represented an alleged organizer of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Melanie Partow, an attorney for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was invited to be a guest speaker at the symposium, which sought to examine how the United States’ response to the 9/11 attacks changed detention, immigration enforcement and government surveillance, according to the School of Law’s website. Mohammed is accused of helping plan the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and he is currently in prison at Guantanamo Bay. 

Mohammed also confessed to killing Daniel Pearl, a Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter, in Pakistan in 2002. Pearl’s father, UCLA computer science professor Judea Pearl, denounced the event in a Thursday X post. 

Frenk said in a Friday statement that he understood why the event hurt Judea Pearl and others, praising the professor’s decades of work in combating antisemitism and terrorism. 

“The brutal murder of Daniel Pearl was an act of unspeakable evil, and I support Judea and his family,” Frenk said in the statement.

Pearl said in an emailed statement that he was disappointed with the School of Law’s decision to proceed with the symposium.

“September 11 and October 7 are two painful events that should be used to commemorate the victims of those attacks—Americans and Israelis—free of any political agenda,” Pearl said. “Platforming organizations like CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) that have been sympathetic to the attackers is distasteful, if not despicable.”

Frenk added that speaking at UCLA should not “be mistaken for the university’s approval.”

“UCLA’s values are clear. We reject antisemitism and terrorism in all their forms, and we believe our campus must be a place where the dignity of every member of our community is respected,” Frenk said in the statement. “Nothing about this event at the UCLA School of Law, which we do not endorse, changes or qualifies those commitments.”

Five law school centers and programs within the UCLA School of Law – the Critical Race Studies Program, International and Comparative Law Program, Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy and Promise Institute for Human Rights – sponsored the event, according to the event’s website.

The event brought more than 20 experts to discuss the government’s successes and failures since the Sept. 11 attacks, said Ahilan Arulanantham, faculty co-director of the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy, and LaToya Baldwin Clark, faculty director of the Critical Race Studies program, in an emailed statement.

“We are enormously proud of the symposium we organized, and UCLA should be too,” they said in the statement. “Had any of the critics actually attended, they would have heard moving memorials to the victims of the 9/11 attacks and its aftermath — including opening remarks from Professor Ahilan Arulanantham, who was present in Manhattan on 9/11, and from Jasleen Kohli, Executive Director of the Critical Race Studies program.”

UCLA Media Relations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Partow attended the event. Partow did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Frenk’s statement. 

“Judea’s voice, and the history behind it, deserve to be heard with the seriousness and humanity they demand,” Frenk said.