asked Her Majesty's Government:Whether they hold the Palestine Liberation Organisation responsible for terrorist actions, and if so (i) whether they will specify those actions and the years in which they took place, and (ii) whether they took those actions into account in taking their decision to have no official contact with the PLO.

The PLO is a broad-based umbrella organisation. Some of its component elemets have a deplorable terrorist record. Individual terrorist acts associated with PLO groups, particularly in the 1970s, are too numerous to list. We do maintain contacts with the PLO at official level, and the then Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Hurd) met Mr. Farouq Qaddumi in 1983; but the PLO's failure unequivocally to renounce violence is a major obstacle to our developing contacts at Cabinet level.