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doors and four months of intensive deliberations, the judges of the UK’s Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) released a 144-page and 362-point verdict declaring the inclusion of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) on the list of proscribed organisations to be void and unlawful. The Labour Home Secretary – Jacqui Smith – appealed against this judgement, but the Court of Appeal rejected her case and ordered that the blacklisting of the PMOI should be revoked following a debate in both Houses of Parliament. The PMOI was finally removed from the UK terrorist list in June 2008.
    During the course of reviewing the case by the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) and the Court of Appeal, lawyers acting on behalf of the 35 MPs and Peers who had lodged the original appeal with the POAC demanded sight of all the so-called ‘classified’ evidence on which the UK government had based its claims of terrorism against the PMOI. Hundreds of pages of carefully censored files were duly released to the courts. These included details of the mysterious phone-call from Mrs Felicity Brown, the lady pretending to work for the Foreign Office who turned out to work for British Intelligence. There were even several pages of transcripts of our conversations, with the MI5 officer admitting candidly that I had seemed ‘well informed’ about the PMOI.
    There was also a detailed, almost verbatim, account of a meeting that I had held in Brussels following a request from a senior FCO civil servant. I thought the FCO official was coming to the European Parliament to speak to me about international fisheries agreements, as I was president of the Fisheries Committee at that time. However, it turned out to be another attempt to browbeat me into severing my ties with the PMOI. I really blew my top at this meeting and gave the civil servant a piece of my mind, reminding him that he was a paid official, while I was elected by the UK citizens. I warned him to tell his political masters that I was not going to be intimidated or bullied in this way and that their policy towards Iran and their proscribing of the PMOI was simply wrong. I demanded evidence to substantiate claims that the PMOI were indeed engaged in acts of terrorism and I was bluntly told that such evidence was far too sensitive to divulge to a mere member of the European Parliament and was ‘classified’. It was a very ill-tempered exchange, all of which duly appeared in the ‘classified’ documents released to the POAC.
    Equally amazingly, although unsurprisingly, much of the so-called independent evidence on which the UK government based their decision to list the PMOI as a terrorist organisation turned out to have come from two individuals who lived in the UK and were well-known as paid agents of the Mullahs in Tehran! Iranian citizen Massoud Khodabandeh had been recruited by the MOIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, in the late 1990s, and his Britishwife, Anne Singleton, had been recruited by the MOIS in 2002. 1 Both had been trained by Iran and were well-known for press articles and propaganda that always sought to trash the PMOI and its leadership and supporters. For the UK government to base their terrorism charges on evidence supplied by two MOIS agents was preposterous. The whole thing was farcical and exposed the appeasement charade in which Blair and Straw had been engaged. No wonder the POAC delivered such a withering judgement.
    The POAC’s verdict stated: ‘This appeal against the refusal of the Secretary of State to de-proscribe the PMOI is allowed’ and ‘we order that the Secretary of State should 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 in Schedule 2’. The judgement also noted: ‘Having carefully considered all the material before us, we have concluded that the decision at the first stage is properly