Remarks by Lord Corbett of Castle Vale at The Lord Slynn of Hadley European Law Foundation celebrating the life and work of Gordon Slynn at an event at Gray’s Inn on 2 December 2009:
Gordon could detect injustice a mile away. So when he learnt of the position of the Iranian resistance group, the PMOI, his commitment was total and continuing.
Gordon used masterly of the law, here and in Europe – and his recognised pre-eminence – to help victims of oppression to stand tall and to know that they did not stand alone.
But Gordon had another tool in his kit when it came to confronting the mullahs who stole democracy from the people of Iran and demonstrated their contempt for human rights and freedom of expression in the violent aftermath of June’s stolen presidential election.
That tool was wisdom. While civil servants in the Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office and their ministers here and elsewhere in Europe parroted irrelevant allegations about the PMOI, whose source and accuracy could not be established, Gordon guided the legal challenge to the government’s refusal to take them off the list of organisations concerned with terrorism. The triumph in our courts and then the European court was largely Gordon’s though he never made that claim.
It’s testaments to his passion and commitment that only the PMOI has been removed from the list of terrorist organisations here and over the rest of the EU. Wisdom and in-shakeable belief in human rights paved the path to that historic victory. In serious humiliating judgements the courts found our government ignored the evidence, asked the wrong questions and got the law wrong.
Gordon, at great personal risk, visited Camp Ashraf, sixty miles north-east of Baghdad, where 3,400 Iranian Resistance members have made their home for the past 23 years and against which Iraq, in a pact with Iran, threatens a repeat of its earlier murderous violence if they claim rights they have under International humanitarian law to resist peacefully against being taken to the borders of Saudi Arabia.
I tell you now that, as we were in the courts here and in Europe, we will not let this threatened violation of human rights happen. Gordon will never forgive us if we did.