Source: The Sunday Telegraph
It should hardly be news that our Government has agreed to uphold the rule of law. But such was the case last week when Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, laid before Parliament an order removing the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI[MEK]) from its list of outlawed terrorist organisations.
She did so only on trenchant orders from the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, after two previous attempts to defy rulings of the High Court.
Source: The Telgaraph
It should hardly be news that our Government has agreed to uphold the rule of law. But such was the case last week when Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, laid before Parliament an order removing the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI[MEK]) from its list of outlawed terrorist organisations.
She did so only on trenchant orders from the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, after two previous attempts to defy rulings of the High Court.
For seven years, at the behest of the mullahs who rule Iran, the Government has outlawed the PMOI, the largest part of Iran's opposition movement, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), in an effort to appease one of the most unpleasant and ruthless regimes in the world.
Since the Appeal Court ordered the lifting of the ban, Tehran has been incandescent, warning that unless our Government defied the court, relations between Iran and the EU would be gravely endangered.
The Lord Chief Justice's ruling has badly embarrassed Britain in front of her EU partners, whom the Government had persuaded to impose the ban at EU level (twice defying rulings of their own European Court of Justice). Our fellow EU members went along with this because, since 2001, the EU has been vainly trying to talk the Iranians out of building nuclear weapons.
Last week in Brussels an all-party array of senior MEPs pressed for the EU's ban also to be lifted, as they heard Mrs Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the NCRI, proclaim that "justice had finally prevailed over the policy of appeasement", a policy which, she said, had made "global peace and security a hostage to the murderous mullahs".
Both Britain and the EU are still a long way from recognising that the NCRI provides the only hope of a secular, democratic alternative to the lawless theocracy that is destabilising the entire Middle East, from Gaza and Beirut to Iraq and Afghanistan. But at least they may be making a start by obeying their own laws.
Photo: Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran speaks in Brussels
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NCRI Editor's note:The People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (or Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, MEK) is a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.