The wall Street Journal wrote on Thursday, May 8, 2008: Britain’s government lost a long-running legal battle to keep an Iranian dissident group on its list of terrorists, a change that could have implications for the group’s treatment elsewhere and for already troubled relations between Iran and the West.
Wednesday’s ruling by England’s Court of Appeal means the U.K. government will now have to remove the Mujahedin e-Kalq, or People’s Mujahedin of Iran, from its terrorist blacklist. The MEK is also listed as a terrorist group by the European Union and the U.S. The group’s leaders said they would use the U.K. court decision to challenge those blacklistings, too.

Iranian officials have urged suppression of the MEK in negotiations with Western governments over Tehran’s nuclear program and other issues, according to several diplomats who were involved in those talks. Iranian officials couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday.

Wednesday’s court ruling in London, however, found that the U.K. government had “no reliable evidence,” either public or classified, on which to base a finding that the MEK continues to be a terrorist group or intends to commit terrorist acts in the future. The last evidence of an MEK attack the court accepted was in 2001, the same year the group was blacklisted in Britain and the year the group said it was abandoning military methods to achieve its goal of replacing the Islamic clerical regime in Iran.

MEK lawyers in Washington are working on a petition to the State Department to delist the group, arguing that the U.K. court verdict exhausts all the possible bases on which the U.S. could reasonably keep the MEK’s terrorist designation, said Mohammad Mohaddessin, foreign-affairs chief for the MEK’s political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

“The political justification for this is gone too, now. At the time the MEK was blacklisted, the U.S. government was considering a rapprochement with Iran,” said Mr. Mohaddessin, adding that with the hard-line conservatives dominant in Tehran, that is no longer the case.
U.S. officials said they were uncertain how the U.K. ruling could affect Washington’s designation of the Iranian group.

A U.S. official said the MEK’s listing will have to be reassessed during the current calendar year, as under State Department guidelines, the designations have five-year life spans. “It’s something we’ll have to deal with,” said a U.S. official working on Iran. “I don’t know what will be decided.”

The MEK has rebranded itself as a pro-democracy movement since 2001 and has long claimed that it was blacklisted by Western governments as a political concession to Iran’s government. In 2002, the group’s political wing exposed Iran’s once covert nuclear fuel program, providing details later confirmed by international inspectors. More recently, it has won support for its cause from numerous legislators in Britain, the U.S. and Brussels.

The case that ended in London Wednesday was brought by 35 members of Britain’s two houses of parliament.

“Those [Iranians] demanding democratic change now know they do not stand alone,” said Lord Corbett, who led the British parliamentarians. “The British government and EU must now side with the Iranian resistance and the majority insistent upon freedom rather than those who have stolen it from them.”

The EU’s Court of First Instance ruled in December 2006 that the MEK had been wrongly added to the EU’s terrorist blacklist, but EU governments have since refused to delist the group. The EU listing could now become harder to sustain at the next regular review this summer, according to a European diplomat in Brussels familiar with the issue.

EU officials have said that the MEK was blacklisted by the EU primarily on the basis of the U.K. threat assessment.

A spokesman for the EU’s foreign-policy high representative, Javier Solana, declined to comment on the implications of the British court decision. He said the EU has already addressed technical failings in the listing process identified by the European Court of First Instance.

Blacklisting by the EU requires the bloc’s 27 member states to freeze the MEK’s assets and to increase police and judicial co-operation in relation to the group, he said.