Dunham/Associated Press
Reprinted from Original Article from New York Times here

LONDON — After a seven-year legal battle, Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled
Wednesday that the British government was wrong to include an Iranian
resistance group, the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, on its list of banned
terrorist groups. Lord Corbett, left front, urged celebrating People’s Mujahedeen backers to
sit down Wednesday.

Spokesmen for the group, whose name means People’s Holy Warriors, said the
ruling appeared to leave Britain’s interior minister, Home Secretary Jacqui
Smith, with no further legal recourse but to order Parliament to strike the
group from a list of more than 20 proscribed terrorist organizations under
Britain’s Terrorism Act.

The court’s ruling denied the government’s bid to carry the appeal further,
seemingly closing off recourse to Britain’s supreme appellate body, the
so-called Law Lords. But the British government did not say what it planned
to do.

The People’s Mujahedeen has roots that go back to the Iranian resistance to
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s rule in the mid-1960s. After the 1979
revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini turned against the group, executing
many of its members and driving others into exile. It regrouped in Iraq in
the 1980s and was listed as a terrorist group by the United States in 1997
and the European Union in 2002.

In 2002 the People’s Mujahedeen provided intelligence on Iran’s secret
efforts to enrich uranium that led to United Nations sanctions against Iran
and a confrontation with the West that continues today. But the group also
has a record of unverifiable or erroneous claims.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry condemned the verdict as a “political ruling
that lacks legal basis.”

“Senior British authorities must explain the reason behind this ruling,” a
ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, said in a statement faxed to news
organizations. He referred to the group’s armed attacks on Iranian officials
and said the ruling “would only propagate terrorism and violence.”

Amid jubilant celebrations by the Iranian group’s supporters in London,
Paris and Iraq, where 3,800 members have lived since 2003 under American
military guard at a vast desert encampment outside Baghdad, the group said
it would seek to overturn a similar proscription as a terrorist group by the
27 nations of the European Union. Spokesmen for the group said that there
was no further justification for the European ban, because it was imposed on
the basis of the 2001 British finding against the group.

A three-judge panel led by Nicholas Phillips, Britain’s lord chief justice,
said in a written ruling that there was “no reasonable prospect of success”
for the home secretary in proceeding with the government’s appeal of a
November 2007 finding by the Proscribed Organizations Appeal Commission, a
quasi-judicial body that rules on appeals by banned groups.

In effect, the appeals court upheld the claims by lawyers for the group that
it had complied with its own renunciation of violence in 2000, when it
announced that it would no longer carry out terrorist attacks and would
concentrate on peaceful opposition to the government in Tehran.

“The only conclusion that a reasonable decision maker could reach,” the
court said, was that since American forces disarmed the People’s Mujahedeen
and allied groups in Iraq in 2003, the group “has not taken any steps to
acquire or seek to acquire further weapons or to restore any military
capability in Iraq.”

The People’s Mujahedeen, the judges said, “has not sought to recruit
personnel for military-type or violent activities,” nor engaged in
“military-type training of its existing members” or sought to support other
groups in attacks on Iranian targets.

“To the extent that the P.M.O.I. has retained networks and supporters inside
Iran since, at the latest, 2002,” the judges said, using the abbreviation
for the group’s full name, “they have been directed to social protest,
finance and intelligence gathering activities which would not fall within
the definition of ‘terrorism’ for the purposes of the 2000 Act.”

The People’s Mujahedeen is also on the United States’ list of banned terror
groups, and Bush administration officials have said in the past that they
have no plans to lift the ban. But if Britain and the Europe Union lift
their bans, the group would be able to use its legalization as a basis for
raising money and organizing resistance to the ruling ayatollahs in Iran.

Spokesmen for the People’s Mujahedeen in London and Paris demanded after
Wednesday’s ruling that the British authorities, and the European Council of
Ministers, act promptly to remove the “terrorist label” from the group,
allowing it to resume normal activities. The group says it is committed to
restoring democracy in Iran and opposes any attempt by Iran to acquire
nuclear weapons.