ANTI-TERRORISM LAW PASSES LOWER HOUSE OF PARLIAMENT

C O N F I D E N T I A L AMMAN 006708 SIPDIS SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 08/28/2016 TAGS: PGOV PTER KTFN JO SUBJECT: ANTI-TERRORISM LAW PASSES LOWER HOUSE OF PARLIAMENT REF: AMMAN 4025 Classified By: Ambassador David Hale for reasons 1.4 (b) and (d). ¶1. (C) SUMMARY: Jordan's lower house of parliament approved a new anti-terrorism bill. Passage of the measure was a priority for the Bakhit government because of the King's call for new anti-terrorism legislation. The law strengthens Jordan's regime for countering terrorism financing and closes an important gap in pending anti-money laundering legislation. END SUMMARY. ¶2. (U) Jordan's lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, amended and then approved on August 27 the government's bill providing for the prevention and punishment of terrorism. Immediately following the November 9, 2005 Amman hotel bombings that killed more than 60, King Abdullah announced his intention to seek new legislation that would emphasize preventing terrorism before it happened. That month, the King publicly instructed the new cabinet of PM Ma'ruf al-Bakhit to make this legislation one of its top priorities. The bill now goes to parliament's upper house, the Senate, which is likely to approve it with little debate. ¶3. (U) Highlights of the bill include: -- Authority for the government to freeze the assets of persons suspected of terrorist conspiracy, place them under surveillance, and prevent them from leaving Jordan. COMMENT: This fills what would otherwise have been an important gap in the draft Anti-Money Laundering (AML) currently before Parliament. The draft AML criminalizes only illegally-obtained funds being used to support terrorism; the anti-terrorism law just passed criminalizes legally-obtained funds used for terrorist ends. We expect parliament to act on the draft AML in the coming month. END COMMENT. -- A provision that limits investigative detention to 30 days. The government's original draft bill was vague on this point, and some MPs, oppositionists and human rights activists argued that it could have been read to permit renewal of two-week detention periods indefinitely. The version of the bill the Chamber approved requires the government to charge or release suspects within thirty days. -- A definition of terrorism. After a lengthy debate during which several MPs expressed concern that the law's definition of terrorism should exclude so-called national liberation movements, the approved bill defines terrorism as "every intentional action committed by any means that leads to killing anyone or causing him physical harm or inflicting damages to public or private property...if the intention of that action was to disturb public order and endanger public safety and security or impede the implementation of the law or the constitution." Government spokesman Nasser Judeh told Ambassador that this definition is the most significant part of the anti-terror bill. ¶4. (U) Yaqoub al-Kaswani, spokesman for the opposition parties' committee, complained the law "will lead to curbing public liberties and will serve the U.S. and Israel, which consider all forms of resistance against occupation and struggle for national independence as acts of terrorism." Some human rights activists and Islamist parliamentarians argued that statutes already on Jordan's books provided the government with all the tools it needed to confront real threats to security. IAF MP Zuhair Abu Ragheb summed up these critics' views when he told parliament that the law was a government ploy to exploit the November 2005 bombings and to limit freedom of speech. Interior Minister Eid al-Fayez replied in parliament "existing laws penalize a crime after it happens, but we are talking about preventing crimes in the planning stage. The new law is a preventative law." ¶5. (C) Several Embassy contacts, including human rights activist Lamis Nasser and Lt. Colonel Ramzi Nuzha, a staffer with the State Security Court - commented that there is little in the draft law that will place new restrictions on personal freedoms, or for that matter give the authorities actual new tools with which to combat terrorists. Colonel Nuzha added that he believed that the GoJ felt that having an anti-terror law was now an international standard. ¶6. (C) Comment: The Bakhit cabinet has checked an important box on its Palace-drafted "to-do" list. The government was prudent to place in the terrorism bill a provision against moving "clean" money to terrorists; attempting to pass this mechanism as part of the AML would probably have been more controversial, as many MPs view the AML is an "American" bill. In addition to the AML, an ambitious legislative agenda for this summer's session of parliament still lays ahead, in the form of bills to reform municipal government, income tax, political parties, financial disclosure requirements for officials, and regulation of NGOs and the media. HALE