The world is lacking efficient assessment methods of the success of reintegration policies applied to the returning foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs), Fionnuala Ni Aolain, 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) The world is lacking efficient assessment methods of the success of reintegration policies applied to the returning foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs), Fionnuala Ni Aolain, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, told Sputnik in an interview.
"Reintegration has only relatively recently become a policy discussion. It's really only emerged in post-2014. So, most states including states who have taken back � Russia, Kosovo, Tunisia and Kazakhstan ��are still trying to figure out what to do. They are learning as they go," Ni Aolain said.
She noted that some European countries, like the United Kingdom and Ireland, have vast experience in reintegration, because they managed to reintegrate hundreds of people after a conflict not so long ago. The experience gained several decades ago could be used in the current context.�
"One of the things that we're missing at a national and a global level is good analysis and assessment of how successful they are there. You can't say if something has worked or hasn't worked unless you have good data, and in most countries, they haven't developed this capacity to develop, to collect that information in a way that's useful. That's what the problem is right now," the rapporteur said, adding that one of the most important things to do would be to 'actually start to assess the success of the work" on reintegration.
According to the rapporteur, for this purpose, scientific methodology is required, and few countries are doing that at the moment.
In early November, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu announced that Turkey would start repatriating foreign members of the Islamic State terrorist group (ISIL, 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.
Meanwhile, there are more than 20,000 foreign terrorist fighters still alive in Syria and Iraq, coordinator of the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning ISIL, Al-Qaida (a terrorist group banned in Russia) and Taliban, Edmund Fitton-Brown, told Sputnik in an interview earlier in November.
