Washington has taken a much more sympathetic line
lately to the main Iranian opposition group, the National Council of
Resistance of Iran, which for 30 years has campaigned for a democratic,
secular state, and more than 100,000 of whose supporters have been
killed by the Guards.

After a lengthy
investigation, the US authorities found no evidence for placing the
largest group in the NCRI, the People’s Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI), on
its list of terrorist organisations.

All this is
in startling contrast to the record of the EU, and our own Government
in particular. In 2001, the British Government led the way in
proscribing the PMOI (at the bidding of the Teheran regime, as Jack
Straw explained last year). When the rest of the EU followed suit, the
European Court of Justice last December ruled that it had acted
unlawfully.

But in January, at Britain’s behest,
the EU’s Council of Ministers agreed to ignore the judgment. A thousand
parliamentarians from all over Europe protested, including more than
100 members of our own Parliament, but the Council of Ministers again
agreed, in June, to flout the ECJ’s ruling.

Astonishingly,
this leaves us not only prohibiting, in flagrant breach of EU law, the
chief body that campaigns peacefully for a democratic Iran, but
explicitly doing so to appease a regime which itself orchestrates
terrorism, supplying the rockets and roadside bombs that are killing
British and other allied troops.

So wonderful to know that we’re governed by the rule of law, isn’t it?