Ban on True Father visiting United Kingdom lifted after 27 Years

On November 5, 2005, at about 11 a.m. an airplane carrying True Parents landed at a small airport, Biggin Hill, in the foxhunting countryside near the London suburb of Chislehurst.

This was True Father’s first visit to the United Kingdom since the summer of 1978, when he came with Unification Theological Seminary students to pioneer home church. Since 1995, the British government had banned True Father from entering Britain. Germany subsequently banned True Father as “a threat to public order” and was followed by fourteen additional European Union nations who employed common immigration practices under the Schengen Agreement’s immigration system.

Schengen Agreement provisions were designed to prevent terrorists and drug dealers from abusing liberal European travel codes. Unificationists eventually would be successful in demonstrating that the ban on True Father was illegitimate and having it removed. Prior to that, in October 1995, British Home Secretary Charles Clark lifted the British ban and True Father delivered a public address, “True Family and I,” in London as part of the Universal Peace Federation’s Inaugural World Tour.

On disembarking the plane, True Father was reported to have said, “Hmm … harder to get into Britain than to enter the spiritual world.”