Since 2012, the Global Center’s Blue Sky reports have offered an independent analysis of UN counterterrorism efforts to inform UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy review resolution negotiations, support civil society advocacy, and enhance efforts to strengthen the accountability of UN entities responsible for implementing the Strategy.
The seventh report in the Blue Sky series, “Beyond Incremental Reform: Right-Setting Counterterrorism at the United Nations,” comes at a particularly challenging moment in multilateral cooperation. The report offers a sober assessment of the UN counterterrorism architecture and explores opportunities to reign in and realign the world body’s counterterrorism efforts with its human rights and civic space protection commitments under the UN Charter.
“Beyond Incremental Reform” looks back at the past 20 years of the global counterterrorism agenda and takes stock of key developments at the UN since the last Strategy review in 2023. In doing so, the report highlights a broad range of structural imbalances between normative authority and operational power, accountability mechanisms and political incentives, and coordination and consensus. The report concludes with a series of recommendations to the UN and its member states to place accountability, human rights protection, and gender justice priorities at the center of the architecture and UN counterterrorism practice, and improve coherence across the UN system, not through additional layers of coordination but through clearer thresholds, responsibilities, and consequences.
With the horrific October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups as its justification, Israel launched a war of collective punishment on the entire population of Gaza, while also intensifying repression of Palestinian civil society and cementing Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank. In this piece for DAWN’s Democracy in Exile, Matt Schwartz and Franziska Praxl examine how the Israeli and global crack down against Palestinian rights and solidarity groups are part of a long pattern of violence and repression that has heavily drawn on a counterterrorism justification. They describe how the use and abuse of counterterrorism measures to target minorities, dissenters, and movements for justice is hardly unique to Israel, however. And that for the past two decades the United Nations has played an increasingly central role in the proliferation these measures around the globe – even in the face of ever-mounting harms to human rights and civil liberties.
The United Nations has long recognized that sustainable peace and security can only be achieved through state security measures and active, meaningful engagement by a diverse community of civil society actors. Yet around the world, as the Global Center’s Matt Schwartz and Franziska Praxl explain in their post in IPI’s Global Observatory, states are using UN resolutions, policy guidance, and technical assistance to justify mounting human rights violations, frequently targeting activists and civil society groups.
In support of wider civil society efforts to demand more meaningful influence on and engagement with UN counterterrorism efforts, this report presents the results of a year-long scoping study undertaken by the Global Center and Rights & Security International with the support of a committee of 15 civil society advisors. Based the input of more than 170 civil society representatives from more than 50 countries around the world, the findings and recommendations presented in this report explain the hesitation of many groups worldwide to engage with the United Nations on counterterrorism-related issues, the range of barriers they face, and their aspirations for the UN role in promoting and protecting civil society and civic space. The report highlights key preconditions for greater civil society engagement with UN entities regarding these topics and offers a framework to strengthen the UN’s engagement with civil society embodying specific attributes of meaningful engagement across a range of mutually reinforcing modalities of engagement. The report concludes with several practical entry points for addressing the preconditions for engagement, including specific recommendations to the UN and its Member States.
A launch page the provides details about the scoping report process can be found here.
