India must show patience on its counter-terrorism concerns, says the U.N.’s senior most official on the issue of designating Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar and implementing U.N. sanctions against Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders Hafiz Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi based in Pakistan.
“India and all member states should understand that [the U.N. processes] take time and they must continue to cooperate,” said Jean Paul Laborde, the Executive Director of the Security Council’s counter-terrorism body, CTED, that was formed under resolution 1373 after the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. to help countries work together on prosecuting terrorists.
Mr. Laborde was in Delhi last week to address the concerns over the slow processing of India’s applications with the U.N. on terror.
Chief among those is the early ratification of the Comprehensive Convention on International Terror (CCIT) that India introduced in 1996. The CCIT has been held up at the U.N. by several countries, mainly the U.S. and France.
These countries feel that the current definition of terrorism targeting civilians could also be used against their military during international interventions. However, Mr. Laborde said he expects that the CCIT would be discussed at the UNSC in December this year when he holds an “open briefing” on international cooperation on terrorism, and is hopeful of eliciting a resolution on the issue that the Modi government has taken up strongly.
However, a more urgent issue for the government is naming Masood Azhar as a designated U.N. terrorist to be sanctioned under the UNSC’s 1267 resolution that would direct Pakistan to place restrictions on him. Despite the JeM being named in 2008, its leader has escaped designation, and earlier this year China put a “technical hold” on India’s request. That hold expires on December 31, 2016, but India has made it clear it is running out of patience.
Action delayed: envoyAccusing the U.N. of working in a “time warp” permanent envoy Syed Akbaruddin told the General Assembly’s 71st session on November 8 in a stern statement that its workings were a “mix of ad-hocism, scrambling and political paralysis”.
“While our collective conscience is ravaged everyday by terrorists in some region or another, the Security Council gives itself 9 months to consider whether to sanction leaders of organisations it has itself designated as terrorist entities,” he said in a direct reference to the JeM leader’s case.
