Thursday, 24 January 2008
By LORD CORBETT OF CASTLE VALE Chair, British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom
A judgment last year described the government’s ban on Iran’s PMOI as ‘unlawful’ – will Jack Straw ever admit to his part in it?
The Guardian, January 21, 2008 – Rarely has a verdict been so damning to the government as that issued on November 30 last year by the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission (POAC) over the case of the main democratic Iranian opposition, the PMOI.
Since 2001, at the behest of Iran’s theocratic leaders, the government had banned the PMOI as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000, without a shred of evidence. The former home secretary, Jack Straw, admitted in 2006 that he had banned the PMOI because the mullahs had demanded it.
The terror tag caused anger among parliamentarians on all sides, since the movement had seen 120,000 of its members executed by the regime because of their defence of democracy and human rights. In spring 2006, 35 MPs and lords launched a legal challenge to the ban. The government used every opportunity to delay the hearings. Its case was as thin as it was phoney.
Finally, POAC ruled that the PMOI is not concerned in terrorism. It found that the home secretary’s decision to refuse the application that we had made for de-proscription was “flawed”, “perverse” and “must be set aside”.
Having ruled that the secretary of state got the law wrong and failed to take account of all relevant facts, POAC added: ” … having carefully considered all the material before us, we have concluded that the decision [of the secretary of state] … is properly characterised as perverse.” Thus, POAC ordered the new home secretary to “lay before parliament the draft of an order under section 3(3)(b) of the 2000 act removing the PMOI from the list of proscribed organisations”.
Immediately after the damning judgement, the Home Office announced it would seek leave to appeal; leave to appeal that was resoundingly rejected by POAC. The suspicion is this was yet another attempt in the failed policy of appeasing the mullahs.
This is not the first time the government has refused to obey the law. In Dec 2006, the European court of justice ruled that the PMOI should be removed from the EU’s list of individuals and groups whose assets were frozen as part of the “war on terrorism”. The PMOI were added to this list in 2002 while Straw was foreign secretary and had a habit of making frequent and fruitless trips to visit Tehran as it began its uranium enrichment activities.
That judgment described the ban on the PMOI as “unlawful” and said it must be annulled. Immediately, however, government representatives in the EU began to make the rounds in Brussels, urging the 27-nation bloc to ignore the ruling. And so they did. In June of last year, the EU council of ministers decided that it would “maintain” the PMOI in the terrorist list – in blatant violation of its own laws.
Attempts by the UK/EU to persuade the mullahs to abandon their bid for nuclear weapons and to stop killing British troops in Iraq have failed. The last thing our world needs is the mullahs’ lethal mix of violent fundamentalism and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.
POAC’s decision signals that the Iranian resistance – demonised, vilified, unjustly labelled terrorist – wants no more than to help the people of Iran to rid themselves of the misrule of the mullahs.
I now invite Straw to apologise for the hurt and harm he has done to the Iranian resistance. He acknowledged when he banned the PMOI that it had no presence in the UK or any record of damage to UK or western interests in the Middle East – a novel definition of terrorism.
The pledge of Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the coalition National Council of Resistance of Iran which includes the PMOI, is for freedom, democracy and social justice which ensures women have an equal share in the nation’s affairs in an Iran which separates religion and state – a new Iran that can take its place in the international community rather than being a loathed and dangerous pariah.
Iran will be free. It needs the new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, to distance herself from Straw’s dodgy record towards the democratic Iranian opposition by de-proscribing the PMOI immediately.