Panelists at the forum “Sanctions, Incentives, and Denuclearization: Options for Engaging the New Kim Regime in North Korea” in Washington, D.C. on February 16. Left to right: Alistair Millar, David Cortright, Stephen Bosworth, George A. Lopez.

The Fourth Freedom Forum’s Sanctions & Security Research Program, a partnership with the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, hosted two leading experts on North Korea in a lunchtime event that took place at the Forum’s Washington, DC office. The event titled “Sanctions, Incentives, and Denuclearization: Options for Engaging the New Kim Regime in North Korea,” featured the expert knowledge of Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, U.S. Special Representative to North Korea from 2009 through October 2011 and dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University, and George A. Lopez, who served on the UN Panel of Experts for North Korea between October 2010 and July 2011, and is the Hesburgh Chair of Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute. The meeting highlights included consideration of the United States’ role in any discussions, the resumption of six-party talks, and the uncertainty in North Korea’s future, particularly with regard to nonproliferation.

Click here to read more about the event.

The Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation is pleased to announce the release of its new report on Reshaping United Nations Counterterrorism Efforts. The report provides concrete suggestions for strengthening international counterterrorism efforts over the next decade, including three specific, costed options for a single UN counterterrorism coordinator. The report details 22 recommendations aimed at helping the UN to better exploit its comparative advantages in countering terrorism and to enhance the productivity of its partnerships with other counterterrorism actors, including states, regional intergovernmental bodies, non-government, experts and civil society.

Based on twelve months of research, interviews, and consultation with counterterrorism officials and experts from around the world, the report presents recommendations for reshaping UN counterterrorism efforts by:

(1) creating a broader movement against terrorism, involving not only states but also a range of other actors;

(2) strengthening engagement in the field and at UN headquarters with human rights experts and civil society;

(3) placing greater emphasis on measuring its own performance; and

(4) enacting one of three options for architectural adjustments to streamline UN counterterrorism efforts and improve monitoring, political analysis, and capacity building. These options are: a UN Counter-Terrorism Coordinator; a Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Counter-Terrorism; or an Under Secretary-General for Transnational Threats.

To view the report click here

The Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation held a closed-door lunchtime discussion in New York onMainstreaming Human Rights Compliant Interrogation Skills in East African Countries. This session brought together representatives of UN member states and UN agencies such as CTED and CTITF to discuss how to encourage innovative approaches to integrating respect for human rights into counterterrorism efforts worldwide.  The meeting focused on a training seminar organized by the Center and the IGAD Security Sector Program in October 2011 in Kampala, Uganda, which provided specialist training to interrogators from Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda.  Discussions in New York explored insights from the Kampala session on integrating human rights protection and counterterrorism, which the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy recognizes as “not conflicting goals, but complementary and mutually reinforcing.” Panelists included Mr. Tom Parker, former Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Crimes against Humanity Investigation Unit; Ms. Liat Shetret, Programs Officer, Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation; and Mr. Tony Camerino, former senior military interrogator in the team that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. Please see our Winter 2011/2012 – East Africa Newsletter here for additional information regarding the training session in Kampala.

On 26 January 2012, at the invitation of the Danish Foreign Ministry, the Center’s Co-Director James Cockayne briefed the European Union Council’s counterterrorism configuration on possible counterterrorism strategies for East Africa. Cockayne highlighted the work of the IGAD Security Sector Program, and the Center’s collaborations with IGAD on the ground over the last four years. With the region going through a period of sustained but fragile growth, Cockayne emphasized the need for a coordinated strategy amongst donors, linking counterterrorism efforts to regional growth and development based on the rule of law. Programming, he argued, should focus on confidence building, institutional strengthening of police, FIU arrangements and human rights protections, and long-term, mutually accountable partnerships between donors and local actors guided by the OECD’s Paris Principles. With numerous external actors engaged in the region, and new ones (such as the Global Counterterrorism Forum) arriving, strategic coordination amongst donors will be key.

Click here to read the briefing summary.

With the support of the Center and the Royal Danish Government, from 18 to 20 January 2012, 21 Ethiopian officials received three days of advanced training on anti-money laundering, countering the financing of terrorism and other economic crimes. The training was conducted on behalf of the Center by the Danish State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crimes, Mr Jens Madsen, and the head of the Danish Financial Intelligence Unit, Mr Jens Kauffeld Andreasen.Participants include:

• prosecutors from the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Regional Bureaux of Justice,
• officials from the Federal Police Commission,
• officials from the the Supreme, High and first instance courts,
• legal advisers at the Ethiopian Financial Intelligence Center, Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, and the Central Bank, and
• Staff of the Ethiopian Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.

The training was opened and closed by the Ethiopian State Minister of Justice (Ato Ahmed Abagisa). It was undertaken as part of an ongoing engagement by the Center with East African officials to strengthen AML/CFT capacity in the region.

As part of the Center’s expanding work on transnational threats, Co-Director James Cockayne, examines the effects of dirty money on security and governance in West Africa and the Sahel. Illicit money, he argues, particularly from trafficking in drugs, is rapidly undermining the region’s political and economic governance, infecting legislatures, police forces, militaries, courts, and presidential offices, as well as chambers of commerce, in countries across the region. This policy brief considers the nature and provenance of these problems and some unorthodox ideas to tackle them.

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Naureen Chowdhury Fink, Senior Analyst at the Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation, was a speaker at the annual Ian Cuthbertson Memorial Lecture hosted jointly by the World Policy Institute and the EastWest Institute on 7 December 2011. The lecture focused on the positive and negative aspects of democratic transitions on efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism. In response to discussions on the “Arab Spring,” Ms. Fink offered the case study of Bangladesh, a country that has struggled to consolidate democracy and find a role for religion and religious politics in social and public life, as an informative comparison… Read More

Guest expert, Jack Barclay, profiles a community counterradicalization program in the United Kingdom known as STREET (Strategy to Reach, Empower, and Educate Teenagers) as a case study of that country’s Prevent strategy. The policy brief examines how STREET operates; why it appears to be so successful; and attempts to identify good-practice lessons that might be applicable in counterradicalization strategies and programs emerging in other states.

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The Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation facilitated the organization of the second “Regional working group meeting on preventing abuse of the non-profit sector for the purposes of terrorist financing” in Auckland on 7-9 November 2011. The meeting, which focused on the Asia Pacific region, was the second regional workshop in a process that includes a series of meetings to discuss the risk of terrorist abuse of the non-profit sector and to share good practices and foster cooperation in responding to that risk in different regions around the world.

Existing UN political missions in Central Asia (UNRCCA), West Africa (UNOWA), Somalia (UNPOS) and the new mission in Libya (UNSMIL) are all mandated to work with governments that are confronted by the specter of rising terrorist and/or violent extremist threats. Yet a recent study by the Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation and Center on International Cooperation at NYU finds that political missions’ approaches to these threats lack strategic coherence. To address these challenges, CGCC and the Permanent Mission of Portugal to the United Nations hosted a lunch for current and incoming members of the Security Council to discuss whether, how, and with what tools, the United Nations Security Council might address the question of terrorism prevention. Also among guests at the lunch were senior representatives of the UN Department of Political Affairs, the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED) and the Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force (CTITF).

Speaking under the Chatham House Rule of non-attribution, participants raised the question of whether the Council should focus primarily on questions of structural prevention, addressing the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism, or the more operational aspects of prevention. Among the key issues raised was whether political and field missions had the necessary mandates and resources to address terrorism prevention; how UN entities might exploit their comparative advantages in addressing this issue; the need to make the most of existing assets in an environment of shrinking financial resources; how to address sensitivities regarding the “counterterrorism” label; the role of civil society in long-term peacebuilding and conflict prevention strategies and the importance of improving communications flows between and among field offices, UN headquarters and member states.