POLITICS: U.N. Seeks Support for Treaty Curbing Terrorist Funds

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 22 2001 (IPS) - Only four of the 189 U.N. member states have ratified an international treaty aimed at cutting off funds for terrorism, a senior official complained Friday.

“Last week’s tragedy underscores the need to ratify and implement the convention,” said Arlacchi, who heads the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention.

“I would issue a strong appeal for quick ratifications and full implementation of existing U.N. conventions, which provide a solid legal framework for global efforts in the eradication of terrorism,” and especially the money laundering and other financial transactions on which terrorists thrive, he added.

The U.N. Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, adopted by the General Assembly in December 1999, does just that, Arlacchi said.

So far, only Britain, Botswana, Sri Lanka, and Uzbekistan have ratified the convention.

The United States, which has urged the international community to track down the financial networks that support terrorists, signed the convention last January but has yet to ratify it.

Palitha Kohona, head of the U.N. Treaty Section, said the 28- article treaty would become law only after being ratified by 22 countries.

He said he was confident that the ratification process would accelerate in the wake of the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius said his country would propose that the financing of terrorism be included in the list of subjects probed by the Financial Action Task Force, established by industrialised nations to fight money laundering.

“We must develop international cooperation to eradicate all the circuits of illegal financing,” Fabius said. “By combating these abuses of globalisation, we are also fighting against the underlying causes of terrorism.”

He added that his ministry plans to create a special unit to probe the funding of terrorists.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has said that funding for last week’s terrorist attacks came through illegal sources.

According to preliminary estimates, the entire operation, including the multiple hijackings and flight training for the hijackers, is said to have cost about 200,000 dollars.

The FBI is seeking from U.S. commercial banks all records pertaining to financial transactions involving the 19 alleged hijackers.

Earlier this week, French President Jacques Chirac called for a coordinated policy, under a U.N. umbrella, not only to eliminate terrrorism but also ferret out all sources of funding for such acts.

Arlacchi said the United Nations, as a global organisation, has a vital role in monitoring the extensive financial networks of terrorist organisations.

The convention, he said, states that a person commits an offence if that person “provides or collects funds with the intention ” of carrying out acts of terrorism.

Ambassador Philippe Kirsch of Canada, who chaired the U.N. working group that finalised the convention in 1999, said that under the treaty, fund-raising for terrorist activities had been formally established as an independent crime, for the first time.

“There is no need for an act of terrorism to be committed,” he said, because the convention criminalises the very act of providing or collecting funds with the intention or knowledge that those funds will be used to carry out a terrorist act.

Kirsch said that although there is no legal definition of “terrorism”, there are universally accepted norms of what constitutes an act of terrorism.

But the new convention, he said, also makes it very clear that terrorism cannot be justified on political grounds under any circumstances.

Article 14 says that no act of terrorism shall be regarded either as a political offence or as an offence inspired by political motives.

Countries that sign on to the convention also are expected to pass national legislation to ensure that the criminal acts covered by the convention are “in no way justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature.”

Parties to the convention also have been asked to identify, detect, freeze or seize any funds intended to abet terrorist acts.