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Ian Paisley suspended by DUP and Parliament following Telegraph probe into Sri Lankan holidays
Ian Paisley could become the first MP to face a forced by-election after he was suspended from Parliament and the party founded by his father following a Telegraph investigation into his conduct.
The Northern Irish MP risks being stripped of his seat and made to fight for reelection after a new mechanism to unseat parliamentarians was triggered by the Commons for the first time.
MPs approved approved recommendations by the standards watchdog that Mr Paisley be barred from sitting in Parliament for 30 working days over his failure to declare holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan Government, estimated to be worth up to £100,000.
Within hours of the decision, the Democratic Unionist Party, which was founded by the Rev Ian Paisley in 1971, announced that the North Antrim MP had also been suspended by the party pending an internal investigation into his conduct.
The major breach of parliamentary rules, exposed by The Daily Telegraph last year, centred on Mr Paisley accepting holidays from a highly controversial Sri Lankan official who has since become embroiled in a corruption probe.
During the holidays, which took place in 2013, Mr Paisley and his family were believed to have been flown business class at the expense of the Sri Lankan government, shuttled around the country by helicopter and treated to stays in glamorous hotels.
They were not disclosed in the members’ register of interests, despite the threshold for registering hospitality being £660 at the time.
In the wake of a backlash from MPs and the public, Mr Paisley referred himself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards in September last year, but claimed The Telegraph’s article was “defamatory” and “devoid of fact or logic”.
In the subsequent inquiry, it emerged that Mr Paisley had written in 2014 to David Cameron, the then prime minister, to lobby against a proposed United Nations resolution calling for an investigation into alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.
Last week the House of Commons standards committee found Mr Paisley guilty of serious misconduct and recommended that he be suspended for 30 working days.
Their recommendations were approved by MPs, meaning that Mr Paisley could become the first parliamentarian to be forced into a by-election under the Recall of Parliament Act.
Passed in 2015, the act contains measures which enable an MP to be stripped of their seat and forced to fight for re-election if they have been excluded for more than 10 days.
To trigger a by-election, 10 percent of registered voters in Mr Paisley’s constituency must sign a recall petition within six weeks.
Patrick Corrigan, head of Amnesty International in Northern Ireland, said: "Mr Paisley saw fit to lobby the Prime Minister against a UN investigation into gross human rights violations, including the mass killing of civilians at the end of the Sri Lankan war, for which no adequate investigation has ever been carried out."
Last night Mr Paisley vowed to fight a by-election, as he accused those trying to unseat him of being “opportunists” with “questionable motives”.
"There are also some who would have me booted out of Parliament and a by-election called to fill that vacancy,” he told his local paper, the Ballymena Guardian.
“I can tell them that I have no intention of going quietly into the night. If a petition leads to a by-election, make no mistake about it, I will seek re-election as I have never run away from an election in my life and don't intend to do so now."
He maintained that he had no ulterior motive for the trips, which he claimed were a “genuine mistake”, adding that he accepted his “total failure” and had offered an unreserved apology to the Commons.