The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (106 page)

The Counter Terrorism Committee (CTC), created under Resolution 1373, has become the core of the Council’s broad based counter terrorism strategy. All fifteen Security Council members are members of the CTC. The Committee operates with three sub-committees that are each responsible for monitoring the reports of a specific group of member states.

In an effort to clarify and categorize member state reporting requirements, the CTC established three phases of work and reporting. In the first phase, states should ensure that they have the appropriate legislation in place for implementing Resolution 1373, be working on acceding to all of the conventions, and have ‘effective executive machinery’ to prevent and suppress terrorist financing.
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In the second phase, states should have in place effective executive machinery for all aspects of Resolution 1373, but particularly those relating to police and intelligence structures, customs, immigration and border controls, and measures to prevent access to weapons. In the third phase, the CTC will consider the cooperative and other requirements of 1373. The initial phase of the Committee’s work, however, revealed that the three stages of work were inextricably interconnected, making monitoring of separate stages difficult, or at least artificial.

The CTC mandate is no small undertaking. Monitoring and tracking reports from member states is itself a major enterprise. As of 30 September 2005, all states had submitted their initial reports, 169 had submitted second reports, and a diminishing number had submitted third, fourth, and fifth reports, for a total of 622 reports submitted to the CTC since its creation.
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From the start the CTC recognized that the reporting requirements, as well as the legislative and institutional requirements, would stretch the capabilities of some member states. A ministerial declaration adopted by the Security Council
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recognized this need and invited the CTC to explore ways in which assistance to such states could be given. As a result, the facilitation of assistance and capacity-building became part of the CTC’s tasks. To this end, the CTC has established a database that outlines various assistance options for member states
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along with a matrix of state assistance needs, so that states or organizations offering assistance can be matched with states in need. The CTC has also undertaken field visits to fifteen states. Ten of these visits occurred in 2006, representing a significant increase in the rate of this part of the assistance process.
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These visits give the CTC a chance to get a much more comprehensive sense of state capacity, which in turn facilitates their ability to help determine which other states can provide the most effective assistance.

A key aspect of the CTC’s work is cooperation and liaison with regional organizations and international organizations. Regional organizations are undertaking counter terrorism programmes and/or the strengthening and development of programmes in member states. Cooperation between these organizations and the CTC helps to prevent redundancy but also is a form of burden sharing. Regional organizations often have a much better sense of the measures being undertaken by member states and their capabilities, or lack thereof, for instituting new ones, thus saving the CTC a number of steps in the evaluation process. Similarly, links to international organizations with functional expertise in areas of interest to the CTC can also strengthen and facilitate the Committee’s efforts. Organizations such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) or the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), only two such examples
among many, bring both information and expertise to the process. To give momentum to, and strengthen, these relationships, the CTC has engaged in five special meetings with a variety of regional and international organizations.
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Part monitoring mechanism, part clearing house, part middleman, the CTC can be seen, therefore, as the hub for a number of spokes along which information and assistance flows. This was its intended role. The CTC is not about initiating policy; it is about ensuring that state policy is implemented to a certain level.

By 2003, the CTC determined that it needed greater resources and stronger institutional structures in order to fulfil its mandate adequately. It submitted two reports to the Security Council in early 2004, proposing a series of changes to the CTC structure.
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In March 2004, the Security Council approved a new structure, establishing a Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED) whose executive director is appointed by the Secretary-General and is based in the Secretariat.
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The revitalization also involved the creation of an Assessment and Technical Assistance Office and an Information and Administrative Office. The changes signal an acceptance both of the scale of the work being undertaken and the need for institutional stability and support for the Committee in carrying out its tasks.

A year after these changes were approved by the Council progress has been made, though slowly. The CTED only became fully operational in September 2005,
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just in time to see an additional task added to the CTC list when the Council directed it to include the requirement to take measures against incitement in its dialogue and assistance plans with member states. A mandated review of CTED’s work at the end of 2005, therefore, had limited usefulness in that there was only a short period in which it could be said to be operating in the way the Council envisaged. CTED has the potential to be an important and innovative element in the Council’s work. There is equal potential, however, for problems. The establishment of a team of inhouse experts, for example, will make it possible for the CTC to be more effective in its work. But such effectiveness is contingent on a clear plan for action. While great strides have been made at the functional level, it remains the case that the prioritization of goals and tasks remains amorphous. Indeed, by the end of 2006, officials were becoming more outspoken about the slow pace of CTED’s work. In reporting to the Security Council in December 2006, the head of the CTC expressed frustration with the CTED’s work with respect to technical assistance. ‘[This] is an area regarding which the Committee is aware that more can and should be done. Personally, I am not pleased that requests from Member States for assistance remain unanswered and that there are so few concrete results to report.’
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The structure of Resolution 1540 mirrors that of 1373 in that the Council requires states to take various measures at the national level and establishes a committee to which states must report on their existing measures and progress in implementing further measures as required by the resolution. By April 2006, the committee had 8 experts on its team, and had received 129 reports from member states. It has also established a process for facilitating assistance through a clearing-house function to those states that request it.
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As part of its reaction to the Beslan attacks, the Council established a working group with a mandate to consider practical measures ‘to be imposed on individuals, groups or entities’ involved in terrorist activities other than those already listed with the al-Qaeda/Taliban committee, including more effective ways to bring them to justice. The working group was also tasked with considering the possibility of an international fund to provide compensation to victims of terrorism.
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The working group consulted with member states as well as outside experts in its deliberations. In its 2005 report it called for continued and stronger efforts on freezing financial assets, preventing the movement of terrorists, curbing the supply of arms, ending public provocation to terrorism, and bringing terrorists to just-ice.
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Such efforts require action by member states, and the working group noted the need to consider the differing capacity of member states in this regard and also recommended stronger engagement with regional, sub-regional, and international organizations. All of these recommendations work to reaffirm the approach already being taken by the Security Council. Agreement could not be reached, however, on the core of the group’s mandate: how to identify individuals or groups that might be placed on a list extending beyond the existing al-Qaeda list. Agreement was also lacking on how or whether to establish a victims compensation fund. This latter is probably primarily a function of a recognition that compensation is most effectively and logically dealt with by individual member states. Lack of a consensus on
identifying non-al-Qaeda individuals or groups is more indicative of differing priorities on the part of Council members, as well as the inherent difficulties in determining on the nature of the criteria to be used in such identification, and the source and strength of the information required to make such a determination.

Inevitably, the creation of three committees and a working group relating to terrorism has prompted calls for coordination and consultation.
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While there are similarities in the monitoring and reporting requirements of the various resolutions, there is a clear difference between the 1267 Committee and the other committees. The primary objective of these committees is to monitor reporting by member states as they fulfil the domestic requirements of the resolutions, and to facilitate assistance for states that need it. In contrast, 1267 is primarily punitive in its intent, seeking to limit al-Qaeda’s ability to manoeuvre and finance its activities. The 1540 resolution and its committee are really about weapons of mass destruction and the need to safeguard associated facilities and materiel rather than terrorism as such, while the 1566 Working Group’s focus is on measures that ultimately support the CTC process. In total then, the work falls into two streams: the hub and spoke process of the CTC committee, based on Resolution 1373 with additional issue areas added on by other resolutions; and the sanctions regime, initially established under Resolution 1267, expanded and amended over time.

The likelihood and desirability of formal linkage and coordination, therefore, is relatively low. Matching the punitive, controlling nature of sanctions with the state support oriented efforts of the CTC might actually be more of a hindrance than a help to both. In any case, a process of ongoing consultation has developed among the committees over time. Avoidance of redundancy and exchange of information when needed often occurs of its own accord given that committee membership is consistent in each instance, with only the chairs being different. There is, however, some logic in considering greater coordination and cooperation at the level of process. Resolutions 1373 and 1540, and Resolution 1624 of 14 September 2005 require member states to submit reports on a number of related issues. Consolidating these requirements into a single reporting process could streamline UN efforts as well as making the process more efficient for member states, helping to
counteract an apparent trend towards reporting fatigue on their part. Indeed, the need to move beyond reporting to a more substantively driven agenda is evident in the push to improve implementation through CTED and the use of experts. Briefing the Council for the last time, the outgoing chair of the CTC Ambassador Loj stated that one of the biggest challenges was the need to get away from ‘seemingly endless reporting’. She notes that ‘the reality was the states felt less inclined to work with the committee because it was not clear how the information they provided was used. It appeared as if providing information only led to requests for more information.’
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The committee trend has brought with it a new level of institutionalization within Council procedures, especially with the 1267 Monitoring Group and the creation of the CTED. An associated development is the use of experts to strengthen and support the Committee’s ability to adequately carry out its tasks. This reflects a recognition of the level of detail and expertise required to deal with the tasks at hand. The use of outside experts is an important development in a broader sense. As the range of issues on the Council’s agenda has expanded (from traditional peacekeeping to ongoing conflict, to post-conflict peace-building, for example), the need for information gathering and analytical support has risen. In terms of the evolution of the Security Council procedure, therefore, this development may act as an important precedent that may be used in other issue areas.

Inherent in the Security Council’s efforts are some implicit assumptions about the nature of terrorism, at least the nature of the terrorism they are seeking to address. The first is that terrorists have money and that they need money to maintain themselves and to plan and carry out attacks; thus the use of sanctions, and the emphasis on financial control and regulation in 1373. The second, which informs resolution 1540, is that terrorists seek destruction, possibly on a massive scale. The third assumption is that terrorists need to use states in order to achieve both of these things. The use of states as the lens through which the Council views terrorism as well as the mechanism most suited to respond to it flows from these assumptions.

This is not a strategy based on an assumption that terrorism can be dealt with head-on. There is no sense in the Council’s response that terrorists and their organizations can be deterred. While there is much discussion of addressing ‘root causes’ there is little Council effort on this side of the equation. Security Council work on terrorism does not contain within it any stated sense of a need to deal with specific conflicts or political grievances. Rather the structure of the Council’s
response is geared entirely at supporting and strengthening the ability of member states to counter terrorism through measures that will constrain terrorist activity.