NEWS))))))

Dow Jones Newswires: A U.K. court Friday refused the government's appeal against the court's order to the home secretary to lift a six-year ban on an Iranian opposition group, taking the group one step closer to official legitimacy in the U.K., a lawyer assisting the legal team said. It's an important victory for the Iranian opposition, which is currently fighting a similar ban on the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran in the U.S. and the European Union. "They (the court) have refused the application made by the home secretary to get permission to appeal," Masoud Zabeti, who is also the chairman of the committee of Anglo-Iranian lawyers, told Dow Jones Newswires. "It's very significant because they didn't even allow a hearing to take place on the basis that the law says that there must be reasonable grounds for success," he added.At the end of November, the U.K.'s Proscribed Organization Appeal Commission ordered the U.K.'s home secretary to lift a ban on the PMOI, which is part of a broader coalition group that forms the main opposition to the current regime in Tehran. The PMOI campaigns for regime change in Tehran and a secular democracy based on respect for human rights. But in 2001 the U.K. government put the PMOI on the proscribed organization list that includes al-Qaida and the Kurdish PKK, citing the group's involvement in violence in Iran following the country's Islamic Revolution. However, the U.K. court found that the PMOI, which renounced the use of force years ago, had not conducted any military activity since 2001. The U.K. government has one last channel for appeal - it can make an application to the U.K. court of appeals, but the strong judgment from the commission in November makes that step less likely, Zabeti said.

******

On Wednesday, Dec. 12, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi attended a meeting organized by the Committee for a Democratic Iran at the French Senate. The meeting was to mark gruesome violation of Human Rights in Iran and was headed by Senator Jean-Pierre Michel and a number of French Senators. The French news agency (AFP) reported this session and wrote: The President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, called on international community to adopt a “firm policy” against the “mullahs’ regime” ruling Iran. She added, 'The mullahs will never stop suppression in Iran, gulping Iraq or producing nuclear bomb because if they do then the regime will disappear completely. Therefore, the international community should adopt a firm policy against the regime.' AFP added: In the presence of Mrs. Daniel Mitterrand, former French First Lady, the President-elect of the NCRI called once again for removal of 'restrictions' against her movement. Mrs. Rajavi said, 'The unjust [terrorist] designation is a kind of human rights violation inflicting huge damages.'

******
The National Council of Resistance of Iran said in a statement on Dec. 12 that amid the Iranian Student Week called by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), student continued to stage gatherings in various Iranian cities such as Mashhad, Kerman, Mazandaran, Shiraz, Tabriz, Najaf-Abad, Hamedan, Kermanshah, Orumieh, and Khorramshahr in which a number of students were arrested by the mullahs’ regime. Alireza Jamshidi, spokesman for the Iranian regime’s judiciary admitted to having arrested the students and said, 'Twenty to thirty persons' were detained, the state-run news agency ISNA reported on Monday. 'A number [of students] have been arrested and are held on a variety of charges such as civil disturbance, rioting and etc,' said Jamshidi. The mullahs’ regime in its faltering state is desperately attempting to contain the rising number of demonstrations and popular uprisings by arbitrary arrests. The Iranian Resistance draws the attention of all international human rights organizations and student unions to the suppressive measures imposed on students by the regime. The Iranian Resistance also calls for international support for the Iranian student movement for freedom.

******
Reuters reported that an Iranian exile group accused Tehran on Tuesday of pursuing efforts to develop nuclear weapons, dismissing as incomplete a U.S. intelligence report that Iran's nuclear arms program was frozen in 2003. Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a study published on December 3 that Iran had stopped activities aimed at making nuclear weapons in 2003, though it continues to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which first exposed Iran's nuclear fuel program in 2002, said it published information three years ago alleging that Tehran had restarted weapons-related work after a short break. NCRI officials said they checked back with sources inside Iran after the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was released, and those informants reported that work on nuclear weapons was still being pursued at three sites. "The clerical regime is continuing its drive to obtain nuclear weapons," Mohammad Mohaddessin of the France-based group, listed as a terror organization in the United States, told a news conference in Brussels. The NIE report concluded that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007. The halt applied to work on explosive device components and to uranium conversion activities, it said. That conclusion contradicted earlier assertions by the Bush administration that Tehran was determined to develop the bomb. Analysts say it could complicate the U.S. drive for a new round of U.N. sanctions against Iran. Tehran welcomed the report as proof Bush wanted to deceive the world about a nuclear arms agenda it has denied pursuing. But major powers said their policy remained one of seeking negotiations with Tehran over inducements to suspend uranium enrichment, while threatening it with sanctions. Mohaddessin said the NCRI agreed with the NIE assessment that activities were suspended in 2003, and specified that in March 2003 Iran closed down a weaponization site in Lavisan, northeast Tehran, fearing it might be detected. But it transferred the weapons activities to a new site in Lavisan and later to two additional sites, information the NCRI had made public from November 2004 onwards, he said. In a second briefing in Washington on Tuesday, former NCRI spokesman Alireza Jafarzadeh presented photographs and lists of sites around Tehran, including Imam Hossein University, that he said played major ongoing roles in nuclear arms development. The Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps initiated and led Iran's nuclear program, said Jafarzadeh, who identified 21 senior nuclear physicists at Imam Hossein University as "commanders and cadres of the IRGC." "Anytime you have the military involved with the nuclear program, we are talking about the bomb," he told reporters. Asked how Washington's entire intelligence community and the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, could have missed evidence of this, Mohaddessin said: "Exactly as they missed Natanz (Iran's uranium enrichment plant) and (the original) Lavisan." Mohaddessin said the new Lavisan site hosted research on laser enrichment of uranium, while two whole-body counters -- used for detecting radiation -- were in use at a university in the central city of Isfahan and a hospital outside Tehran. He said Iran continued research after 2003 on a bomb initiator and on other technologies that could be used in a nuclear bomb. Mohaddessin acknowledged that some of those technologies had civilian uses but concluded: "It is very obvious that the clerical regime resumed its military activities in 2004." NCRI officials said their sources included people with contacts with high-ranking Iranian officials, military officers and the Revolutionary Guard, as well as individuals working inside the new Lavisan facility. The NCRI's armed wing, the People's Mujahideen organization of Iran (PMOI), is banned in the United States and the EU.

******
Four people were hanged on Tuesday in the province of Khorrasan Shomali, north-eastern Iran, state television reported. One of the men was shown hanging in public in the city of Bojnourd. The three others were shown hanging inside a prison there. All four were accused of drug trafficking. Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on bogus charges such as armed robbery and drug smuggling.


******
Four Kurdish students, who called for human rights for their ethnic group at a university protest, have been arrested in Iran. Mohammad Saleh Abuman, Farshad Doostipour, Javad Alizadeh and Sohrab Karimi, spoke in support of human rights for ethnic Kurds during a protest that drew 1500 young people at the University of Tehran on Sunday. They also called for the immediate release of four jailed journalists, three students and one female Kurd, and the suspension of the death penalty imposed on Adnan Hassanpour. Hassanpour, a journalist from the weekly newspaper Asu (The Wave) was sentenced to death on 17 July by an Islamic court for being an "enemy of Allah". Hassanpour and another Kurdish journalist, Hiwa Boutimar, received the City of Siena -Isf award for freedom of the press on 30 November.

******
A 48-year-old man with two children faces death by stoning in Iran after he was accused of having had extra-marital sex. Iran's Supreme Court has sentenced Abdollah Farivar Moghaddam to death by stoning in the city of Sari, in the north of the country. Abdollah was accused of adultery and the Supreme Court confirmed the sentence that was passed by the judges in the tribunal in Sari. In March, another man was stoned in the city of Ghazvin, which is about 100 kilometres from the capital Tehran. Iran is believed to have executed at least 210 people in 2007, according to human rights groups. The Islamic republic has one of the highest rates of execution in the world, second only to China.Capital punishment is applied in Iran in cases of murder, rape, armed robbery, serious drug trafficking and adultery.

******
Associated France Press reported on Monday that Germany on Monday deported to Iran an alleged Iranian secret agent who was jailed for life in 1997 for murdering four Kurdish dissidents in Berlin, officials in the German capital said. Kazem Darabi's Lebanese accomplice, Abbas Rhayel, has also been freed after serving 15 years in jail and was deported last week, prosecuting authorities told AFP. Darabi, 48, and Rhayel, a suspected member of the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah militia movement, were jailed for life for the 1992 murder of four Kurdish dissidents in a Greek restaurant in Berlin called "Mykonos". Their trial set off a diplomatic crisis between Europe and Iran because the German judges found that the restaurant killings had been carried out at the orders of Tehran. Relations with Iran plunged to freezing point over the verdict because Tehran was furious for being fingered for sponsoring terror. Ambassadors from both sides were recalled for several months.