EU Postpones Decision on Anti-Iran Terrorist Group

TEHRAN (FNA)- The European Union postponed a decision on whether to remove an armed Iranian opposition group from its blacklist of terrorist organizations, diplomats said on Wednesday, ahead of a visit to Iran by its foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

EU foreign ministers had been due to review the list at a meeting in Luxembourg next Monday, but the item has been dropped pending a decision by the British parliament on taking the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) off the British blacklist, one EU diplomat said.

The postponement averts a potential clash when EU foreign policy Javier Solana travels to Tehran on Friday to present a revised offer from the world’s six major powers of cooperation if Iran gives up its nuclear rights.

“We are waiting for the British parliament because the EU decision is based on it,” the EU diplomat said.

Last month three senior judges at England’s Court of Appeal dismissed a government challenge to an earlier ruling that the authorities were wrong to ban the group.

Solana will meet Iranian leaders on Saturday and Sunday to present an offer from the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany of economic, technological and political benefits to Iran if it gives up its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) right of uranium enrichment.

An EU Presidency spokeswoman said the process of review of the EU terror list was ongoing but declined to comment on what the outcome could be.

The MKO began as a leftist-Islamist opposition to the late shah of Iran but fell out with popular clerics who took power after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Western analysts say it has no support inside Iran because it joined Iraqi forces during the 1980-88 war between the two neighbors.

MKO has assassinated scores of Iranian citizens and statesmen during the last three decades, including a president and a prime minister as well as several politicians, clerics, MPs and military commanders.

The group is also banned by the United States.

In December 2006, an EU court annulled the bloc’s decision to have MKO on the blacklist.

But the EU kept its ban, saying the group had been put on an updated version of the list and been given the reasons.

Removal of the group from the EU list would mean animosity towards the Islamic Republic.