On November 12, 2014, the Supreme Court of the U.K. (the Court) dismissed an appeal in R (on the application of Lord Carlile of Berriew QC and others) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, upholding a prior decision to maintain a ban preventing dissident Iranian politician Maryam Rajavi from entering the U.K. to speak before Parliament.  According to the press release, the ban was originally implemented in 1997 and was based on the grounds that “her presence ‘would not be conducive to the public good for reasons of foreign policy and in light of the need to take a firm stance against terrorism.’”  The claimants, members of the U.K. House of Lords who wished to bring Mrs. Rajavi to speak before Parliament, argued that the Home Secretary was violating Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention of Human Rights (the Convention) in relation to both the members of the House of Lords and Mrs. Rajavi by refusing to grant Mrs. Rajavi entry.  The claimants argued the “Home Secretary’s reasons were legally irrelevant, because they depended on the potential reaction of a foreign state which did not share the values embodied in the Convention.”  However, the Court disagreed and ruled that “a predictive judgment of the executive about the likely reaction of a foreign country to a decision of the United Kingdom government is ordinarily entitled to a large measure of respect from the courts both (i) because the constitutional separation of powers assigns such judgments to the executive, and (ii) because the executive has greater institutional competence in this area by virtue of its greater specialised experience and the wider range of advice available to it.”