Lord Hylton
Main Page: Lord Hylton (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)Department Debates - View all Lord Hylton's debates with the Home Office
(8 years, 8 months ago)
Lords Chamber
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will reclassify the Kurdistan Workers’ Party as a national resistance movement.
My Lords, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, is a proscribed organisation. The Terrorism Act 2000 allows the Home Secretary to consider deproscription by written application. There are no provisions in legislation to classify a group as a resistance movement.
My Lords, when I tabled this Question I did not expect the Answer to be, “Yes, of course”. However, have the Government fully considered that the PKK long ago stopped killing civilians; that it has offered many ceasefires, particularly since 1999; that it is asking not for independence but for devolution; and that it has the support of non-violent civil society in the south-east and of many other minorities in Turkey? They all want a new constitution. Will the Government consider these points?
Political aspirations are of course noble and those are the types of issues which should be addressed in the peace talks that we want the PKK to return to. But the fact is that the PKK has been responsible for 140 deaths of military police and civilians in Turkey just in recent months, and that is the reason it is proscribed as a terrorist organisation and why it will remain so.