EU urged to remove Iranian group from terror blacklist

MEPs have backed a campaign which calls on the EU to remove an Iranian group from its list of terror organisations.

The call comes as a news conference in parliament, which Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the opposition forces in Iran, was supposed to attend, had to be called off at the 11th hour on Tuesday due to “security concerns”.

Rajavi was due to appear before journalists in parliament as part of her ongoing campaign against what she calls the “illegal” recent decision by EU leaders to maintain the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI) on the terrorist list.

But Scottish Tory Struan Stevenson, one of the MEPs who organised the event, said a decision was taken to cancel it over concerns that it may have been “infiltrated by people set on causing her harm”.

“We had similar concerns when she last appeared in parliament, so it was felt better to cancel the news conference this time,” he told theparliament.com.

Instead, Rajavi, who is accused by Tehran of waging an armed struggle against the ruling regime in Iran, spoke at a meeting attended by MEPs and supporters of her campaign.

Stevenson criticised the EU for maintaining the PMOI on the list in spite of a recent decision by courts in the UK to remove the organisation from the terror blacklist.

He said, “It is completely unjustified. By maintaining the terror label against PMOI, the main force for change in Iran, the EU has blocked the path to democratic change.”

The meeting in parliament was also attended by a group of prominent European lawyers who accused the EU of abusing the law in order to keep the group on its list of terrorist organisations.

They pointed out that the group has already won two lengthy court cases finding their continued inclusion in the list unlawful.

The EU, citing new evidence, has kept the group on.

But Paris-based Rajavi, whose husband founded the PMOI, told the meeting that this had triggered accusations that EU leaders are flouting the law to avoid upsetting sensitive nuclear negotiations with the Iranian government, the PMOI’s declared enemy.

The lawyers argue that the EU’s refusal to abide by court decisions in this case is eroding the fight against terrorism in a similar, if less spectacular way, to the US internment camp for alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay.

EU foreign ministers called for Guantánamo’s closure two years ago.

The EU developed its terrorist blacklist in 2001, after the 11 September attacks on the US. It added the PMOI at the request of the UK, which provided evidence of its terrorist activities.

But the EU’s court of first instance ruled in 2006 that the group had been wrongly included, citing a failure to give the PMOI an adequate hearing and insufficient reasons for the inclusion.

A UK court later described the British government’s decision to keep the group on its terrorist list as “perverse”.

After losing a final appeal in May, the UK removed the group from its own blacklist. That should have led to the group’s delisting by the EU also. But in July, France presented what it described as new evidence and the listing remains.

The EU will review its terrorism blacklist again toward the end of the year.

“The [European] council has abused its powers because it has taken the French prosecutorial decisions as a procedural pretext for maintaining, probably on political or other inscrutable grounds, the PMOI on the list,” said Rajavi.

• Previous article
• Next article