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Joint efforts:External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar with delegates at the United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee meeting in New Delhi on Saturday.PTI
Terrorism is still one of the “gravest threats” to humanity, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said on Saturday, the concluding day of the United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee’s special meeting in India that sought to focus on the misuse of emerging technologies by terrorist groups. He called for “zero tolerance towards terrorism”.
Mr. Jaishankar said that new and emerging technologies had enhanced capabilities of terror groups, “particularly in open and liberal societies”. “Internet and social media platforms have turned into potent instruments in the toolkit of terrorist and militant groups for spreading propaganda, radicalisation and conspiracy theories aimed at destabilising societies,” he said.
The meeting, which was addressed by all members of the Security Council, and included ministerial-level participation from Albania, Gabon, Ghana, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, committed to ending safe havens for terrorists and countering new technologies being used for terrorism.
However, the final “Delhi Declaration” did not include the concerns of the U.S. and India concerns over China’s block on terrorist designations at the UNSC.
The U.S. and the U.K. sparred with Russian diplomats over references to a “massive” drone attack attempted in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which the Russian army claimed to have thwarted.
Sanctions regime
“The UN Security Council, in the past two decades, has evolved an important architecture, built primarily around the counter-terrorism sanctions regime... This has been very effective in putting those countries on notice that had turned terrorism into a State-funded enterprise,” Mr. Jaishankar said in a veiled reference to Pakistan, adding that the threat of terrorism is “growing and expanding” nonetheless. Mr. Jaishankar’s statement came a day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had referred to India-U.S. joint efforts to designate several Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) terrorists through the UN’s 1267 sanctions committee.
“All Member States must cooperate fully in the fight against terrorism in order to identify safe havens, deny terrorists access to them and bring to justice... any person who supports, facilitates, participates... in the financing, planning, preparation or commission of terrorist acts,” stated the final “Delhi Declaration on countering the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes”.
The 35-paragraph “Delhi Declaration” focused on the threat from Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) including drones, online radicalisation and recruitment as well as terrorist financing through cryptocurrencies and other virtual means, with members noting “with additional concern the increasing global misuse of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) by terrorists to conduct attacks against, and incursions into critical infrastructure and soft targets or public places, and to traffic drugs and arms.”
In particular, the CTC members referred to attacks in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as cross-border drone activity into India.
