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Ministers will draw up new laws to ban state-backed groups such as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the face of growing “complex” threats from foreign powers, Yvette Cooper said on Monday.
The home secretary made the announcement after three Iranian nationals were charged on Saturday with spying in the UK.
It also comes after Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, on Monday called for new legislation needed to combat foreign actors who exploit “freedom and openness” in the UK to sow division.
Cooper told MPs the charges have come against a “backdrop of rising numbers of Iran-linked operations on UK soil where there have been repeated warnings by ministers, the police and our security and intelligence agencies”.
State-backed groups are exploiting the activity of criminals and terrorists to undermine the UK and its laws, she said.
“As well as growing, those threats are becoming more interconnected, and the old boundaries between state threats, terrorists and organised criminals are being eroded.
“We have seen malign foreign state organisations seek to exploit any vulnerability from criminal networks, to our cybersecurity, to our borders to do us harm,” she added.
In her Commons statement, Cooper said the government will create a new power of proscription “to cover state threats, '“a power that is stronger than current National Security Act powers in allowing us to restrict the activity and operations of foreign state-backed organisations in the UK, including new criminal offences”.
Cooper said Hall had reported there were “gaps in a series of areas, including on proscribing legislation where he identifies a series of legal difficulties in using powers that were designed to deal with terrorist groups for state and state-backed organisations, such as the IRGC”.
In Monday’s review, Hall concluded that the Terrorism Act 2000 was never intended to regulate the behaviour of state actors, and said looking at that law as a way to proscribe state bodies is “quite simply shopping in the wrong department”.
The security services said in October that the police and MI5 had responded to 20 Iran backed plots presenting potentially lethal threats.
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson Lisa Smart asked how cuts to the Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget would enable malign states to use “their soft power to influence events overseas”.
“We know we live in a perilous world with war on our continent and we Liberal Democrats welcome the increase in defence spending. However, the decision to take this money from the ODA budget will leave a vacuum in some of the most vulnerable places,” she said.
