United Press International
February 1, 2008
By BARONESS GOULD OF POTTERNEWTON

LONDON, Feb. 1 (UPI) — Iran under the mullahs is the only country in the world that continues to hang children, and it has an equally sinister track record over its treatment of women.
On Jan. 15, Amnesty International said in a report that nine women and two men in Iran are waiting to be stoned to death, adding that the “horrific practice” was “specifically designed to increase the suffering of the victims.”

“The majority of those sentenced to death by stoning are women. Women suffer disproportionately from such punishment. One reason is that they are not treated equally before the law and courts, in clear violation of international fair trial standards,” Amnesty International said.

Rahele Zamani, 27, was hanged in Evin Prison in Tehran in December. Her 3-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter are now orphans.

At least 113,454 women were detained by state security forces for being “improperly dressed” over the summer in the Iranian capital alone, according to Tehran police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan.

Maltreatment of women is indoctrinated in the regime’s ideology. The mullahs’ Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said last July, “We are witnessing in our country that some women activists and some men are trying to play with Islamic laws … in order to harmonize them with international conventions related to women. This is wrong. … They shouldn’t see the solution in changing Islamic jurisprudence laws.”

Earlier this month Ibrahim Lotfollahi, a 27-year-old student from Payam Nour University in the western Iranian city of Sanandaj, was tortured to death by agents of the regime’s notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Local authorities tried to pass off the cold-blooded murder as suicide and they refused permission to Lotfollahi’s parents to exhume the corpse of their son who had been buried without their knowledge. The revelations regarding the true surroundings of Lotfollahi’s tragic death came from Iranian opposition activists.

The case serves as a stark reminder of what life can be like for those brave people in Iran who choose to speak their minds and take a stand against the theocratic dictatorship. But, in an unforgivable incongruity, the British government has thus far chosen to side with the mullahs instead of the millions of Iranians longing for change.

For years, our government has been appeasing the regime in exchange for lucrative trade deals in the vain hope of convincing the mullahs to abandon their terrorist tactics abroad. The climax came in 2001, when our Home Secretary Jack Straw accepted the regime’s demand that he ban its main democratic opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran.

Turning a blind eye to the execution of 120,000 PMOI sympathizers by the regime, our government went so far as to persuade the EU to ban the PMOI as well.

When in December 2006, the European Court of Justice annulled the EU’s ban on the PMOI, our government shamefully pressured the EU Council of Ministers to ignore the verdict of Europe’s highest court. But in November 2007, following an appeal by 35 parliamentarians from all aisles, the United Kingdom’s Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission ruled that the government’s ban on the PMOI was “flawed” and “perverse.” It ordered the new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to immediately submit an Order to Parliament lifting the ban on the group.

Whereas one could not be blamed for thinking that justice had prevailed, the government has since announced that it would appeal the decision despite losing its application for grounds to appeal.

On Jan. 23, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe described POAC’s verdict on the PMOI case as a “slap in the face” for the government and called on the EU/U.K. to “implement immediately the decisions of competent European and national judicial institutions affecting the status of the listed persons or entities.”

It remains unclear what the government’s next step will be. Meanwhile in Tehran, the regime continues to torture and execute political prisoners. When challenged over its brutal practices, it simply responds that it is killing those who the EU/U.K. class as terrorists.

The people of Iran deserve freedom. While military action against Iran is out of the question, we in the United Kingdom should be assisting the Iranian people by exposing the mullahs’ barbaric practices and urging the U.N. Security Council to impose trade sanctions on the regime for its gross violations of human rights. But the first step in getting on the side of the Iranian people is for the government to lift the ban on the PMOI immediately.

(Baroness Gould of Potternewton is a Labor Peer. She has been a deputy speaker of the House of Lords since 2002.)

Monday, 28 January 2008
Goesta Groenroos
OpEdNews.com

“Injustice is the best ally for terrorism,” reiterated Dick Marty, the Swiss senator in a press conference last week following the ratification of a resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe condemning the methods used by the EU and the UN Security Council for blacklisting groups and individuals.

This resolution by Europe’s human rights watchdog, was based on a report pointing out that the use of terrorist lists by the EU and UN is arbitrary and violates fundamental rights, thus putting at risk the very the fabric of a democratic society, i.e. the rule of law

What is more tragic is that, under the cloak of combating terrorism, the terrorist list in some cases has been used a bargaining chip with rough dictatorships and terror masters. The treatment of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), the principal Iranian resistance movement, is very telling as it was singled out as one of the most egregious cases in the Council of Europe’s report. As Dick Marty put it, cases such as the PMOI controversy are an example of the “disastrous” effects of the blacklists.
The PMOI, a democratic anti-fundamentalist Islamic movement, has been the primary victim of the clerical regime’s suppression at home. Tens of thousands of its members and supporters have been executed by the religious tyrants ruling Iran over the years. Its members have been the primary target of the Iranian hit-squads all over Europe. The Iranian resistance movement was classified as a terrorist organization in the UK in March 2001 on the behest of the Iranian government, as Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary of Britain acknowledged in an 2006 interview: “”¦They (the Iranian government) were demanding and actually successfully of me when I was the Home secretary that we should ban a terrorist organization MEK (PMOI) that was working against Iran.”

As a subsequent of 9/11, the EU started to draw its terrorist list in 2001. In May 2002, as the EU terrorist list was updated, the PMOI, the pivotal member organization of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the coalition of Iranian opposition groups, was added to the list. Here too, the oppressors of the Iranian people turned to Her Majesty’s government to do their dirty work.

The PMOI successfully challenged its listing in EU’s Court of First Instance. In December 2006, in a landmark verdict, the Court of First Instance annulled the inclusion of the PMOI in the terrorist list. The EU Council chose not to appeal the verdict.

The ruling reiterated that during the listing process, the fundamental rights of the PMOI, including “the right to a fair hearing, the obligation to state reasons and the right to effective judicial protection” were infringed.

If that were not enough to get the Iranian resistance movement off the hook, 35 prominent members of both Houses of the British Parliament from all three major parties submitted an appeal to a special court, the Proscribed Organizations Appeals Commission (POAC), urging the removal of the PMOI from the UK terrorist list. This Commission was specifically set up by the British Government to review appeals by proscribed organizations.

Subsequent to 6 months of exhaustive review, including 5 days of open and 2 days of closed hearing, on November 30, 2007 the Court ruled against the British Government and the proscription. The Court ordered the Government to lay an order before Parliament removing the PMOI from the proscribed list.

In the unprecedented ruling, the Court described the Government’s failure to de-proscribe the PMOI as ‘perverse’ and ‘flawed’ while further adding that the decision ‘must be set aside’. The Court stated: “We recognize that a finding of perversity is uncommon. We believe, however, that this Commission is in the (perhaps unusual) position of having before it all of the material that is relevant to this decision.”The PMOI inclusion in the EU terrorist list was condemned by more than 8500 lawyers throughout Europe, as well as a majority of members of parliaments in the UK, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, Norway, and hundreds of members of the European Parliament.

One would have expected that the EU would pay heed to all these court rulings and growing chorus to remove the PMOI from the terrorist list. But this blatant violation of the rule of law by individuals whose duty it is to uphold them continues. What is equally serious, this great injustice imposed on the Iranian people and their Resistance in order to appease the fundamentalist dictatorship persists.

Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the NCRI pointed out that by deciding to maintain the PMOI on its terrorist list, the EU Council is absolutely isolated and is defying two pillars of European democracy, namely Europe’s judicial and legislative institutions. Insisting on the same policy, the Council is not only in breach of the law, but also has defied the will of representatives of millions of Europeans who are represented in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. She called on the EU member states to remove the PMOI from the terrorist list and not allow such lawlessness and scandal, originally imposed on the Council by the British government, to continue.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King while sitting in a Birmingham Jail, in 1963.

So if EU wants to be taken seriously and be effective in the fight against terrorism, it should fight injustice and stop trampling on the rights of the Iranian Resistance that wants to wrest Iran from the clutches of their hideous, Islamic fundamentalism mongering oppressors.

Goesta Groenroos is Researcher in philosophy at Stockholm University and an expert on Iran

Thursday, 24 January 2008
By LORD CORBETT OF CASTLE VALE Chair, British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom

A judgment last year described the government’s ban on Iran’s PMOI as ‘unlawful’ – will Jack Straw ever admit to his part in it?

The Guardian, January 21, 2008 – Rarely has a verdict been so damning to the government as that issued on November 30 last year by the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission (POAC) over the case of the main democratic Iranian opposition, the PMOI.

Since 2001, at the behest of Iran’s theocratic leaders, the government had banned the PMOI as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000, without a shred of evidence. The former home secretary, Jack Straw, admitted in 2006 that he had banned the PMOI because the mullahs had demanded it.

The terror tag caused anger among parliamentarians on all sides, since the movement had seen 120,000 of its members executed by the regime because of their defence of democracy and human rights. In spring 2006, 35 MPs and lords launched a legal challenge to the ban. The government used every opportunity to delay the hearings. Its case was as thin as it was phoney.

Finally, POAC ruled that the PMOI is not concerned in terrorism. It found that the home secretary’s decision to refuse the application that we had made for de-proscription was “flawed”, “perverse” and “must be set aside”.

Having ruled that the secretary of state got the law wrong and failed to take account of all relevant facts, POAC added: ” … having carefully considered all the material before us, we have concluded that the decision [of the secretary of state] … is properly characterised as perverse.” Thus, POAC ordered the new home secretary to “lay before parliament the draft of an order under section 3(3)(b) of the 2000 act removing the PMOI from the list of proscribed organisations”.

Immediately after the damning judgement, the Home Office announced it would seek leave to appeal; leave to appeal that was resoundingly rejected by POAC. The suspicion is this was yet another attempt in the failed policy of appeasing the mullahs.

This is not the first time the government has refused to obey the law. In Dec 2006, the European court of justice ruled that the PMOI should be removed from the EU’s list of individuals and groups whose assets were frozen as part of the “war on terrorism”. The PMOI were added to this list in 2002 while Straw was foreign secretary and had a habit of making frequent and fruitless trips to visit Tehran as it began its uranium enrichment activities.

That judgment described the ban on the PMOI as “unlawful” and said it must be annulled. Immediately, however, government representatives in the EU began to make the rounds in Brussels, urging the 27-nation bloc to ignore the ruling. And so they did. In June of last year, the EU council of ministers decided that it would “maintain” the PMOI in the terrorist list – in blatant violation of its own laws.

Attempts by the UK/EU to persuade the mullahs to abandon their bid for nuclear weapons and to stop killing British troops in Iraq have failed. The last thing our world needs is the mullahs’ lethal mix of violent fundamentalism and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

POAC’s decision signals that the Iranian resistance – demonised, vilified, unjustly labelled terrorist – wants no more than to help the people of Iran to rid themselves of the misrule of the mullahs.

I now invite Straw to apologise for the hurt and harm he has done to the Iranian resistance. He acknowledged when he banned the PMOI that it had no presence in the UK or any record of damage to UK or western interests in the Middle East – a novel definition of terrorism.

The pledge of Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the coalition National Council of Resistance of Iran which includes the PMOI, is for freedom, democracy and social justice which ensures women have an equal share in the nation’s affairs in an Iran which separates religion and state – a new Iran that can take its place in the international community rather than being a loathed and dangerous pariah.

Iran will be free. It needs the new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, to distance herself from Straw’s dodgy record towards the democratic Iranian opposition by de-proscribing the PMOI immediately.

Wednesday, 23 January 2008

NCRI – Speaking to a meeting in Atlanta on Monday, January 21, Professor Raymond Tanter, president of the Iran Policy Committee said, “The most powerful tool the United States can use to put Tehran’s rulers on alert that gross violations of human rights must end is to empower the Iranian people for democratic change.”

“To this end, the United States should remove the terrorist designations of the main, democratic Iranian opposition groups. The evidence behind such designations is specious, and the hampering of the democratic opposition jeopardizes U.S. national security interests,” he reiterated.

Speaking on Dr. Martin Luther King Day, Professor Tanter explained King’s position on human rights abroad, which is based upon one fundamental principle: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

He went on to describe how impressively Dr. King’s legacy continued after his death and that “The ideals of Martin Luther King Jr. were a critical source of inspiration to democratic movements” around the world.

On human rights and democratic opposition in Iran he said, “The main opposition groups, the Mojahedin-e Khalq and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), in stark contrast to the regime, are democratic, inclusive of women, and have as one of their highest missions the protection of human rights in Iran. In fact, NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi has looked to Dr. King’s Birmingham Letter as a source of inspiration as the Iranian people are terrorized by those ruling Tehran.”