At a regional conference for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), participants discussed the role of parliamentarians in addressing the threat of foreign terrorist fighters and associated challenges. The main purpose of the conference was to further strengthen the relationship between the International Parliamentary Union (IPU) and the United Nations (UN), as well as to launch a new partnership between the parliaments of the MENA region, supporting their understanding of relevant Security Council resolutions, exploring how parliaments can contribute to counter-terrorism efforts, and building a foundation for future activities in the region in this domain.
The conference allowed the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) to highlight its cooperative relationship with parliaments and explain the critical role that they could play. CTED further stressed the Security Council requirement that States comply with their obligations under international law, including human rights law and humanitarian law, in their counter-terrorism efforts. CTED also introduced participants to several related tools, including the 2015 Madrid Guiding Principles on stemming the flow of foreign terrorist fighters and its Addendum (2018), as well as the CTED-UNOCT-INTERPOL Compendium of good practices to protect critical infrastructures from terrorist attacks, and shared promising practices observed during its engagement with Member States.
Hosted by the House of Representatives of Egypt, the conference took place in Luxor, Egypt, from 26 to 28 February 2019. It was jointly organized by the International Parliamentary Union (IPU) and the United Nations (the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UNODC, and the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT)), with funding provided by the European Union.
Participants included parliamentarians of Member States of the MENA region (Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen), representatives of United Nations agencies, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean (PAM), the European Parliament, the Arab League, the Arab Parliament, and the Parliament of Bangladesh.
Additional information:
The Addendum is available in all UN languages and can be accessed here.