Norbert Röttgen, a Christian Democratic Union lawmaker in the German parliament, told The Jerusalem Post that the legal requirement for Germany and the EU to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization has been met.
Röttgen, who was chairman of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee from 2014 to 2021, flatly rejected the arguments of the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock who claim there is not a court case to justify the classification of the IRGC as a terrorist entity.
“All the legal requirements are fulfilled,” Röttgen said, adding that “currently the German attorney general is prosecuting terrorist attacks linked to the IRGC on several synagogues in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and in the US there is a federal court decision against the IRGC for acts of terrorism.”
The German parliamentarian said that “the German Foreign Ministry is pretending that there are legal obstacles to proscribing the IRGC. The foreign minister says that investigations or convictions in the EU are needed to list the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group, but the European Court of Justice has clarified that investigations or convictions can also be from outside the EU for a group to be put on the terror list.”
