Europe passed another Brotherhood resolution last month and still has no ban in force
Nothing legally binding happened in Europe in the past week. The obstacles named by a French minister and a Dutch intelligence service explain why — while Jordan’s courts keep producing sentences.
On 8 October the European Parliament adopted an EPP-proposed resolution calling for an EU strategy against Brotherhood influence and urging the Council to consider adding Brotherhood-linked entities to the EU terror list, by 381 votes to 167 with 15 abstentions, as reported by Il Foglio on 22 October. The resolution binds no one. Beneath it, the national picture is a sequence of votes without statutes. France’s National Assembly passed a non-binding resolution on 26 January 2026 designating the Brotherhood a terrorist organisation, with La France Insoumise voting against; as of October the government’s two “entryism” bills had not become law, and in April a French court overturned the ban on the Musulmans de France annual gathering. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told The National on 4 May that an EU terror listing would be “impossible to implement” and legally fragile: “We prefer to act on a case-by-case basis.”
The Dutch case contains the load-bearing fact. The Tweede Kamer narrowly adopted a PVV motion from Maikel Boon and Geert Wilders on 17 March asking the government to ban the Brotherhood and affiliated organisations; it received 76 votes in a 150-seat chamber. Brussels Signal noted the obstacle: the AIVD does not currently consider the Muslim Brotherhood a structured organisation in the Netherlands, which makes a ban legally difficult. In Austria, Chancellor Christian Stocker told Heute in early September that the government intends to prohibit political Islam by constitutional law — “If religion is used politically, we must oppose it with all severity” — and Integration Minister Claudia Bauer said she would submit an initial outline to ÖVP coalition partners. Two months on, no draft text has surfaced in public.
Assessment: The contrast worth holding is procedural, not moral. In Europe, parliaments vote and executives decline, because the legal test requires a structured organisation that intelligence services say they cannot locate. In Jordan the sequence runs the other way: a 2020 dissolution ruling, Interior Minister Mazen al-Faraya’s April 2025 ban on all activity and promotion of the group’s ideas, and a military court sentencing nine defendants to between three and 15 years in October 2025. A Foundation for Defense of Democracies brief dated 27 October reports seven more convictions on 25 October, including a six-month term for former leader Murad al-Adaileh — single-sourced to an advocacy organisation and not yet confirmed by Petra, AFP or Reuters, so treat it as a claim. The unasked question in Amman remains what the dissolution committee has actually seized: eighteen months after the confiscation order, there is no public inventory and no valuation.