NCRI – Clerical regime’s campaign to tarnish the image of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran through its Intelligence Ministry and agents abroad were exposed in a seminar in Stockholm on January 7. Mr.Kenneth Lewis, president of the Lawyers Without Borders, Sweden, addressed the issue and the following are excerpts of his remarks:
I visited Camp Ashraf in the end of March and beginning of April 2004 and personally interviewed over one hundred people while there and talked to an additional hundred and fifty people that was together with a Danish lawyer Anna Land who did the same thing. All of these people that we talked to we could not find one single person who wanted to leave Camp Ashraf not even one.
I have been dealing with human rights issues all my life. It has been a passion with me and the thing that impress me the most about my visit to Camp Ashraf was the fact that women are in the forefront of the liberation struggle of Iran and to me this is the greatest achievement in human rights in that part of the world that possibly could take place.
After the terrorist attacks on the 11th of September against the world Trade Center and Pentagon you realized the whole world was mobilized in a so called struggle against terrorism and the EU did not want to be left out of that. They adopted a series of resolutions and common positions in the Council of Ministers in the end of December 2001.
Amongst the things that they decided to do was to create a list of persons and organizations who they considered to be terrorists that was as I said in December of 2001. Now the big problem with the decision. I myself have nothing against fighting terrorism specially the kind of indiscriminate fundamentalist terrorism we have seen taking place in Iraq or as far as that is concerned in Palestine and Israel. The problem is how do you fight it? What are the values that must be preserved in that situation and what the European Council of Ministers have done, has created a definition of terrorism which is so general and so unclear that in fact any liberation movement in the world and in fact the resistance to the Nazis during the Second World War would be classified as terrorist.
The Council of Ministers realized that this was a problem because they were forced to take an additional measure in which they explain that this definition of terrorism would not apply to the resistance to the Nazis in case anyone could misinterpret that thing. But the problem is that we don’t know whether this resolution has any legally binding effect or not.
In May of 2002, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran was added to the list of terrorist organizations we had never ever had any explanation to why the People’s Mojahedin was put on this list. We had never seen any argument any evidence as to why the organization is there and the problem with the procedure in the European Union today is that officially there is no possibility none what so ever for an organization which had been placed or an individual placed on this list to appeal the decision. There is no procedure. This situation is of course very serious.
In my opinion the decision to place the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran on the European Union’s terrorist list undermine the struggle against terrorism itself. Many of you will thing that the question of removing the Mojahedin from the terrorist list from a legal point of view can be rather boring. It is not boring, I think you all have to understand the legal struggle against this type of measure and I would make the point that this not the struggle for the People’s Mojahedin, this is a struggle in favor of all people who want to defend democracy and struggle against regimes which do not respect democracy. This is a common struggle for all of us.