Countries may lose interest in freezing the funds of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members unless the United Nations Security Council reforms its sanctions regime, a senior UN official told Reuters.
Richard Barrett said there was a risk that border guards and others responsible for checking people on the UN sanctions list might "chuck it in the bin and not implement it any more" unless it was kept up to date.
The list includes the names of 365 individuals and 125 businesses or organisations associated with al Qaeda and the Taliban. All UN members are required to freeze their funds, and just under $100 million has been seized to date. But the only new entries this year have been three Libyans whose names were added last month.
Afghanistan, home of the Taliban and a frontline state in the war on terrorism, has not listed any new Taliban members since 2001. A number of those on the list are dead.
"The main thing is to keep the dynamic going. Because the list can very quickly look out of date and it can look largely irrelevant," said Barrett, the New York-based co-ordinator of the UN's al Qaeda and Taliban monitoring team.
"I don't think the system's dead, I think it needs a little bit of reforming and refining," he told Reuters in an interview in London. Unless this happened, he said, "I see the risk being slacker and slacker implementation, less and less interest in it, fewer and fewer names even than we have now, and the (Security) Council itself then becoming bored and picking up a new toy and playing with that. And that, I think, is a shame."
Barrett cited several reasons why new listings had slowed to a trickle, including some states' reluctance to admit publicly to a "terrorist problem" by nominating their own nationals.
On the other hand, listing another country's citizens can be seen as an unfriendly act. In January, South Africa blocked a US attempt to impose sanctions on two of its nationals whom Washington accused of financing al Qaeda. Barrett acknowledged that some countries, including in Europe, have misgivings about the fairness of a sanctions regime which can freeze people's assets without telling them why.
"If you're not confident that the process is fair, I think you're concerned that if you put a name on the list there'll be some legal case brought against you, there'll be some awful long drawn-out process of litigation which you may or may not win." Some challenges by sanctioned individuals are currently making their way through the European Union's justice system.
Apart from the volume of funds actually frozen, Barrett said the sanctions system had a deterrent effect on donors. But he said there was still plenty of cash available to militants in both Iraq and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area, some of it linked to the narcotics trade.
"I haven't found that money's in short supply. Shorter supply, less easy to move, but it's still there," he said. "I don't think stopping the money will stop all attacks. Let's hope it stops some, but it's not going to stop all."
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