EU delays terror list update amid Iran diplomacy

The EU has put off a decision on whether to keep Iran opposition group PMOI on its terrorist register, amid fresh diplomatic efforts to stop Tehran's nuclear enrichment programme.

European foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Monday (16 June) were due to update the EU's terror list in a regular six-monthly process, but will now wait until a UK parliament ruling.

The British Court of Appeal in May said the UK was wrong to add the People's Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI) to the EU's blacklist in 2002, in a decision which must be confirmed by MPs.

"We are waiting for the British parliament because the EU decision is based on it," an EU diplomat told Reuters, with the delay potentially seeing PMOI stuck on the register until 2009.

PMOI and its sister organisation, the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), have accused the EU of using legal technicalities to curry favour with the Iran regime, however.

"Tehran's plan is to pretend that if the PMOI was removed from the list, the chances of success in the nuclear negotiations will be much more difficult," NRCI spokesman Mohammad Mohaddessin told newswires this week.

With the British position crumbling, Iranian officials recently held several meetings with French diplomats to secure French support for keeping PMOI on the register, he added.

The PMOI started as a left-wing student movement in the 1960s and organised armed raids against Iran from camps in Iraq during the 1990s. It renounced violence in 2001, but Tehran still describes the group as a dangerous "cult."

EU top diplomat Javier Solana will on Friday travel to Tehran for the first time in two years to present a new diplomatic package on behalf of the US, Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany.

The deal offers financial and technical support for a civil nuclear programme and the restoration of normal diplomatic relations with the world's major powers.

The EU and US earlier this week threatened to impose fresh sanctions against Iranian banks if Tehran does not comply, following a UN report on Iran's uranium enrichment scheme, which could produce weapons-grade material.

Israeli and US politicians have revived talk that a military strike is also possible if diplomacy fails.

Speaking at a press conference with German leader Angela Merkel in Berlin on Wednesday, US president George Bush said that "all options are on the table" when it comes to the nuclear threat.

But Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remained defiant ahead of the Solana trip. "They think they can trample on the Iranian nation's dignity with such things," he said on Wednesday, AFP writes. "We will not trade our dignity with anything."