Source: EUOBSERVER.COM
By: DAVID WADDINGTON, former UK home secretary under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former leader of the House of Lords
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT – As Barack Obama takes over at the White House, one clear danger is that European governments will proceed as if the war on terror is now finished, leading us vulnerable to attack, perhaps by radical fundamentalists with ties to Iran. Furthermore with George Bush gone, the Islamic Republic may itself sense new opportunities to further spread its fundamentalist ideology and terror tactics to Iraq and the Middle East.
The policy of appeasing Iran in an attempt to persuade it to abandon its nuclear ambitions has demonstrably failed and every possible option short of war should be examined as its replacement. More than a dozen pleas by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to Tehran to halt its uranium enrichment activities have fallen on deaf ears and numerous UN Security Council resolutions have been defied. The message we have been giving to the mullahs has been that the West is willing to go on talking and negotiating even as thousands of Iranian uranium centrifuges are spinning at supersonic speeds to produce the core component for a nuclear weapon and see that Iran's ambitions are achieved.
One solution that the West has persistently ignored is the achievement of democratic change in Iran, by the efforts of the Iranian people themselves. Yet Iran has an organised, democratic and nationwide resistance movement. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), led by Maryam Rajavi, is a broad coalition of opposition groups aiming to replace the current theocracy with a democratic, pluralist and secular government – pledged in its manifesto to ban the use of torture and the death penalty and see a nuclear-free Iran live at peace with all its neighbours.
Yet, instead of siding with these brave people as they seek to oust the religious tyrants in power, the European Union is helping the regime to crack down on the democratic opposition.
Following the proscription of the People's Mujahedin Organisation of Iran in the United Kingdom a year earlier, the EU in 2002 imposed an asset freeze on the PMOI [MEK], the main group within the NCRI coalition, with European officials conceding that this action was meant as a goodwill gesture to the then government of Mohammad Khatami.
But the PMOI took the British government to court and in 2006 the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission ruled that the PMOI's proscription was "perverse" and ordered the home secretary to lift the ban. After losing appeals to the High Court and to the Court of Appeal, the government was finally ordered by the Lord Chief Justice to de-proscribe the PMOI, and both houses of parliament unanimously adopted the order doing so last June.
The EU, which had based its ban on the PMOI on the British proscription, was required to remove the group's name from its register. But instead it chose to defy the rule of law, and claimed that since France had conducted a raid on the group's headquarters in 2003 to investigate for terrorist links, this constituted an acceptable reason as to why the ban should remain in effect.
The EU Council of Minister's attempt to play with the rule of law is scandalous, not least because the European Court of First Instance ruled both in 2006 and on 23 October 2008 that the EU-wide ban on the PMOI is "unlawful". In fact, the French raid – itself a pathetic attempt by the Chirac administration to placate the mullahs – was carried out on the basis that the PMOI [MEK] was on the EU's terrorist list. With the courts having ruled that the original decision to ban the PMOI was "flawed", the EU then claimed that the French raid constituted an acceptable reason to maintain the ban. Finally, however, on 4 December, the EU Court annulled for a third time the PMOI's inclusion in the blacklist. It did so only one day after the hearing took place, a powerful sign by Europe's grandest court that it seeks a prompt end to this travesty of justice and mockery of the rule of law.
Later this month, the EU is required to update its terrorist list once again. It must once and for all end its appeasement of the mullahs and stop putting obstacles in the way of those trying to bring about a free and democratic Iran.