CTED participants in the hybrid roundtable event with civil society representatives participating virtually from South-East Europe.
On 29 June 2022, the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) organized a hybrid roundtable event with representatives of civil society from South-East Europe. The event focused on the role of civil society in the development and implementation of comprehensive and integrated counter-terrorism strategies in South-East Europe, encompassing Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia.
CTED’s 2021 Global Implementation Survey noted that, by 2020, most States in South-East Europe had adopted comprehensive national counter-terrorism strategies. In some countries, however, existing strategies had expired, and new or follow-up strategies were currently being developed. Also the scope of the strategies varied, as did the extent to which human rights and gender perspectives had been integrated. The Survey notes that most of the existing national counter-terrorism strategies in the subregion recognize the importance of civil society actors for the implementation of those strategies – and some even have action plans that explicitly involves youth, women, and educational institutions.
“Comprehensive and integrated counter-terrorism strategies should employ whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches,” said Seif El-Dawla, CTED’s Chief of Section for Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, in his opening remarks. “States are encouraged to develop strategies that are holistic and address conditions conducive to terrorist activities, such as socioeconomic, educational, and/or development-related factors.”
The South-East European civil society actors participating in the roundtable highlighted the importance of the contribution civil society organizations, including think tanks and human rights organizations, can provide already at the stage of assessing the threats that inform the national strategy. Several of the civil society representatives intervening in the roundtable event agreed that while strategies developed five or seven years ago tended to focus on the threat posed by the travel of foreign terrorist fighters from the region to the conflict in Syria and Iraq, it was now important to take into account also other forms of violent extremism conducive to terrorism.
The civil society participants acknowledged that in some countries of the region, Governments increasingly recognized the important contributions civil society actors bring to counter-terrorism efforts and to the prevention of violent extremism. One contributor noted that when her country’s previous counter-terrorism strategy was developed, gender aspects and the role of women were not taken into consideration but in a welcome development, during the development of the new draft strategy, there had been great openness to address and include these aspects. The representative of another organization working to protect women and girls against violence pointed out that her organization had been involved in the development of the new strategy “from day one”.
At the same time, participants also highlighted areas for improvement in their collaboration with the Governments of the subregion. These included strengthening trust between Government authorities and civil society actors; ensuring that measures to counter terrorism financing do not affect legitimate not-for-profit organizations’ ability to obtain financing; and making sure that counter-terrorism strategies do not stigmatize ethnic or religious minorities, but rather contribute to protecting them against violence. Participating civil society actors also remarked on the importance of being perceived by Governments as partners whose perspective is genuinely valued.
The roundtable brought together more than 30 civil society actors from the nine South-East European countries, as well as experts from the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT), the Mandate of the Office of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, and other United Nations offices, as well as from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and other regional organizations.
Security Council resolution 2617, adopted at the end of 2021, encourages Member States to consider developing comprehensive and integrated national counterterrorism strategies and effective mechanisms to implement them that include attention to the conditions conducive to terrorism, in accordance with their obligations under international law. The same resolution also recognizes the importance of civil society, including community-based civil society, grassroots organizations, the private sector, academia, think tanks, media, youth, women, and cultural, educational, and religious leaders, in preventing and countering terrorism, increasing awareness of the threats of terrorism, and effective ways of tackling these. The resolution also underscores that civil society organizations’ (CSOs) strong engagement with local communities is crucial for preventing recruitment and countering radicalization to violence and encourages Member States to proactively engage with CSOs when developing rehabilitation and reintegration strategies.