Saturday 31 January 2009

UK abstains when voting on EU terror list

Some days ago I have reported on the decision of the EU to remove the Iranian opposition group PMOI from the EU's terror list.

Now, wondering through the endless stream of Council documents, I have found a document titled "Outcome of Proceedings of the CP 931 Working Party meeting held on 8 January 2009" which looked so strange that I needed to have look into it.

Without mentioning any names, this document summarises the decision to take of PMOI from the terrorism list. And it indicates (taking into account previous discussions where the UK objected) that most probably the United Kingdom might have abstained when it came to the vote on this matter, showing that despite the decision of the Court the UK would not have been convinced it was wrong.

PS: And just out of curiosity I learnt that the CP 931 Working party is the "Working Party on implementation of Common Position 2001/931/CFSP on the application of specific measures to combat terrorism" (the terms of reference of this working party can be found here).

2 comments:

martinned said...

L.S.,

Actually, it could have been France as well. They're the ones who insisted on keeping PMOI on the list, after the first ruling last year.

BTW, your link doesn't work, but the document is still accessible through the Council's document database. Doc no. 5822/09.

Julien Frisch said...

Thanks for the remark on France and the hint to the broken link. Changed the one in the post.