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