BRUSSELS: The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas should be removed from the European Union’s terrorist list, an EU court ruled on Wednesday, saying the decision to include it was based merely on media and Internet reports.
However, the General Court of the European Union, the bloc’s second highest tribunal, said EU member states could maintain their freeze on Hamas’s assets for three months to give time for further review or to appeal the ruling.
Hamas says it is a legitimate resistance movement and contested the European Union’s decision in 2001 to include it on the EU terrorist list and to freeze its funds. The EU court did not consider the merits of whether Hamas should be classified as a terror group, but reviewed the original decision-making process. This, it said, did not include the considered opinion of competent authorities, but rather relied on press and Internet reports.
“The court stresses that those annulments, on fundamental procedural grounds, do not imply any substantive assessment of the question of the classification of Hamas as a terrorist group,” the court said in a statement.
It added that if an appeal against its ruling was brought before the EU’s top court, the European Court of Justice, the freeze of Hamas funds should continue until the legal process was complete. Appeals, which can only be based on points of law, may be brought within two months. The appeal itself would typically last about a year and a half
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