Især USA har strammet kravene til sin store humanitære bistand: Parts of the world are becoming increasingly off-limits to humanitarian agencies
LONDON, 20 October 2011 (IRIN): Ten years have passed since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
10 years that have seen the enactment of more and more counter-terrorism laws that have entangled humanitarian organizations in a web of regulations and requirements, which add to their costs, slow down their transactions, and sow distrust between them and their local partners.
Their frustration is palpable (til at tage og føle på). Jehangir Malik, the UK Director of Islamic Relief, told a meeting in London on 17 October:
– At times I feel that we are so crippled that we should really be honest with our donors, and say, you know, pull out altogether and return everybody’s money to the respective donors.
Malik was speaking at the launch of a paper on Counter-terrorism and Humanitarian Action by the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG), part of Britain’s Overseas Development Institute.
It examines the effects of the laws that have been put in place since 2001, particularly in the United States, but also in Europe and other donor countries.
The US laws are the ones most liable to disrupt the work of humanitarian agencies, in part because of their extra-territorial nature; one can be prosecuted under these laws even if not an American citizen and the acts in question were committed outside the US.
The US government has put in place a sanctions regime, administered by its Office of Foreign Assets Control, which blocks any transfer of funds to people or organizations designated as “terrorist”.
Meanwhile, a Material Support Statute prohibits the giving of support or resources to terrorists or any designated terrorist organization, even if is not done for terrorist purposes.
A test case brought by the Humanitarian Law Project established that even providing training in humanitarian law to such an organization (in this case the Tamil Tigers and the Kurdish PKK) would constitute “material support”.
Kate Mackintosh, one of the authors of the paper, says that judgment “sent shivers through the humanitarian community”. She says US law is much stricter than in comparable countries.
– Their fear is that they could accidentally contravene this law even through the distribution of food or medicines. In general, under criminal law, in order to commit a crime you have to intend to commit a crime, she explained, noting:
– Now that standard is higher than the standard that applies in most counter-terrorism legislation. In the UK, if you had ‘reasonable grounds to suspect’ that your action might contribute to terrorism you would be liable, in Australia if you are ‘reckless’, and in the United States actually you do not even have to know that your activities might contribute to a terrorist act if you know that it has gone to a prohibited group.
– This threat of criminal action has had a big impact. Actual prosecutions have been few, although they have targeted Islamic organizations, so they have had a greater impact on that sector.
The US Department of the Treasury says:
“We have effectively used financial intelligence to identify terrorist networks and disrupt and deter their funding mechanisms. Indeed, this piece of our counterterrorism strategy has been particularly successful: we now see that Al-Qaida is under significant financial strain and is struggling to secure steady financing to plan and execute terrorist attacks against the US homeland and Western interests.”
Guarantees
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