FATF seeks to criminalise financing ‘terror travels’ – Newspaper

WASHINGTON: The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) urged all member states on Wednesday to criminalize the financing of terrorism-related travel.

The FATF guidelines, issued on Wednesday, include explicit instruction to "criminalize travel financing for the purpose of perpetrating, planning, preparing or participating in terrorist acts, or providing or receiving terrorist training."

The instructions also urged the Member States to identify and take measures in relation to any country with strategic deficiencies in the financing of terrorism.

"Global safeguards to combat the financing of terrorism are as strong as the jurisdiction with the weakest measures," the statement said, noting that terrorist funders can "circumvent weak controls against money laundering and terrorist financing ( AML / CTF) to successfully move assets to finance terrorism through the financial system. "

The FATF guidelines, however, did not name any country.

Instead, the agency urged all jurisdictions to work closely with FATF regional agencies and other key partners such as the UN.

He reminded Member States that a key objective of the FATF is to continually identify jurisdictions with significant weaknesses in their AML / CFT regimes, and work with them to address those weaknesses.

The Paris-based monitoring agency has placed Pakistan on its watch list of high-risk jurisdictions, also known as the gray list. So far, there are only two countries, Iran and North Korea, on the FATF list of non-cooperative jurisdictions, also known as the blacklist.

Last month, the global financial control agency kept Pakistan off its blacklist, but warned Islamabad that it only had until February to improve or face international action. The agency said Pakistan had not completed its action plan to combat terrorist financing first before the January deadline, then the May deadline and now October.

Last week, China, which now heads the FATF, accused some member countries of following a political agenda against Pakistan.

"China supported Pakistan and blocked any attempts to blacklist it," Yao Wen, Deputy Director General of Asian Affairs Policy Planning, told reporters in Beijing. "We have made it clear to the United States and India that this goes beyond the purpose of the FATF."

Fighting terrorist financing has been a priority for the FATF since 2001. However, in 2015, the scope and nature of global terrorist threats intensified considerably, with terrorist attacks in many cities around the world and the threat terrorist raised by the so-called Islamic. State (Daesh) and by Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist organizations.

The FATF reminded member states that terrorists and terrorist groups continued to raise money through the use of various means and, therefore, "countries should make it a priority to understand the risks they face with terrorist financing and develop responses. of politics to all aspects of it ".

The statement also underlined the changing nature of the threat, noting that "terrorist threats have continued to evolve, from large terrorist organizations to returning terrorist fighters and right-wing extremists."

The FATF noted that “despite its loss of territory, IS continues to have access to resources that allow it to carry out or inspire terrorist attacks worldwide. Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist organizations continue to pose threats. The funds flow across borders to provide resources to the designated organizations. ”

The statement lamented that many countries had not yet implemented the FATF Standards effectively and did not understand the nature of the terrorist financing risks they faced, nor did they have effective means to combat them.

The FATF urged member states to improve and update their understanding of the risks of terrorist financing, in light of the dynamic way in which risks are changing in different regions of the world.

"Understanding risk is a key part of the jurisdictional anti-terrorist financing regime, since understanding the risks allows countries to allocate resources to detect or interrupt the financing of terrorism," he added.

Posted in Dawn, November 7, 2019