“After months of often-acrimonious deliberations, senior European officials gathered today for a ministerial meeting in Brussels and announced that Hezbollah’s military wing would be added to the EU’s list of banned terrorist groups. The decision comes on the heels of two ambassador-level discussions over the past two weeks, and two previous meetings of the EU’s CP 931 technical working group, named for Common Position 931, the union’s legal basis for blacklisting terrorist groups. The ban is especially important because Hezbollah has resumed terrorist operations in Europe after years of financial and logistical support activities there. If history is any guide, failure to respond in a meaningful way would almost certainly have invited further Hezbollah attacks.

THE PROCESS

Once Britain formally proposed an EU ban, the CP 931 committee met to debate whether Hezbollah’s military wing hit the threshold for designation, eventually concluding that it did. The committee is technocratic in nature and limited to the specific issue of terrorist activities, not foreign policy considerations — its mandate lays out very clearly what types of activities are to be considered acts of terrorism and what types of information are to be considered as evidence.”

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