India to give $500,000 to UN Trust Fund to combat terrorism

Indian Foreign Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar announced on Saturday that India will give $500,000 to the UN Trust Fund for Counter Terrorism this year to support member states in developing their capacity to combat terrorism.

The declaration was made at the UN Security Council Special Meeting of the Counter Terrorism Committee (CTC) in New Delhi’s plenary session.

“India will be making a voluntary contribution of half a million dollars to the UN Trust Fund for Counter Terrorism this year to augment the efforts of Office of Counter-Terrorism in providing capacity-building support to member states in preventing and countering the threat of terrorism,” the minister said.

Jaishankar stressed the need for the international community to take action to address the concerns presented by the misuse of new and emerging technology for terrorist operations.

“Internet and social media platforms have turned into potent instruments in the toolkit of terrorist and militant groups for spreading propaganda, radicalization and conspiracy theories aimed at destabilizing societies,” he said in his keynote address.

Jaishankar said that the technologies have also thrown up new challenges for governments and regulatory bodies given the “very nature of some of these technologies and the nascent regulatory environment.”

“UN Security Council, in the past 2 decades, has evolved an important architecture built primarily around the Counter-Terrorism Sanctions Regime to combat this menace. This has been very effective in putting those countries on notice that had turned terrorism into a state-funded enterprise,” the minister said.

Despite this, the threat of terrorism is only growing and expanding, particularly in Asia and Africa, as successive reports of the 1267 Sanctions Committee monitoring reports have highlighted,” he added.

The special summit got under way on Friday in Mumbai, the scene of a horrifying terrorist attack by terrorists operating out of Pakistan in 2008 that claimed the lives of 140 Indian citizens and 26 foreigners. This conference is being held outside of the UN’s New York headquarters for the first time.