Foreign Terrorist Fighter Cases Need To Be Treated On Case-by-Case Basis - UN Rapporteur

Foreign Terrorist Fighter Cases Need to Be Treated on Case-by-Case Basis - UN Rapporteur

Determining if somebody is a foreign terrorist fighter (FTF) needs to be done on an individual basis, since many of those who are believed to be FTFs can in fact be victims of terrorism, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, told Sputnik in an interview

GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st November, 2019) Determining if somebody is a foreign terrorist fighter (FTF) needs to be done on an individual basis, since many of those who are believed to be FTFs can in fact be victims of terrorism, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, told Sputnik in an interview.

In early November, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu announced that Turkey would start repatriating foreign members of the Islamic State terrorist group (IS, banned in Russia), stressing that Turkey was "not a hotel" for foreign terrorists. According to the minister, there are some 1,200 FTFs held in the Turkish prisons.

"The characterization of all of these as foreign terrorist fighters is unclear. So in order to make a determination whether someone is a fighter or not, there needs to be an individual legal determination. For example, in the case of these 1,200, we have many children. I don't consider children at the age of six months or 12 years old to be terrorists. I think we generally view children as children under the Convention on the Rights of the Child," Ni Aolain said.

The UN rapporteur remarked that the terminology used to describe the entire group was "not in adherence with the rule of law approach."

"If they are [terrorists], then they should be prosecuted. But in this group, we have largely believed that there is a significant number of those who may in fact be victims of terrorism, and therefore they should be treated as victims, not as people who have committed crimes," she continued.

The return of foreign fighters has become a big issue in the aftermath of the IS defeat. US President Donald Trump has urged European countries to take back their citizens who had gone to join the IS and got captured by US-backed militias in Syria.