• 2004: The Netherlands listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
• July 22, 2013: The European Union listed the Hezbollah Military Wing as a terrorist organization. 

In 2004, the Netherlands decided to ban Hezbollah in its entirety, changing its prior policy of proscribing only the organization’s military activities. The Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (Dutch acronym: AIVD) announced in its 2004 Annual Report that Hezbollah’s External Security Organization “has been directly and indirectly involved in terrorist attacks” and admitted that “it can also be concluded that Hezbollah’s political and terrorist wings are controlled by one co-ordinating council.” As a result, the AIVD report stated that “there is indeed a link between these parts of the organization [and] the Netherlands has changed its policy and no longer makes a distinction between the political and terrorist Hezbollah branches.” The report did not specify the reasoning behind this change or whether this policy change resulted from any threat posed by Hezbollah to the Netherlands or global Dutch interests.

The European Union decided to ban Hezbollah’s military wing in July of 2013 in response to concerns over the group’s military involvement in the Syrian Civil War, and its suspected responsibility for a bombing of a civilian bus in Burgas, Bulgaria in 2012. The E.U. has resisted calls to proscribe the whole of the group, presumably for the same reasons as France, which holds considerable sway in the E.U.’s decision-making on the matter.