The Kingdom will host an international counterterrorism conference in Riyadh tomorrow.
On behalf of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Saud Al-Faisal, Undersecretary for Multilateral Relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Prince Turki bin Muhammad bin Saud Al-Kabeer will open the two-day conference seeking greater collaboration in counterterrorism operations between national, regional and international organizations. The United Nations Center for Counterterrorism (UNCCT) and Counter Terrorism Implementation Task Force (CTITF) are collaborating with the Kingdom to organize the event.
Four sessions of the conference will discuss the four pillars of the basic strategy of international counterterrorism, the Saudi Press Agency reported yesterday.
The four key pillars are: Measures to address conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism; measures to prevent and combat terrorism; measures to build a state’s capacity to prevent and combat terrorism and to strengthen the role of UN system and measures to ensure respect for human rights and recognition of the rule of law as the fundamental basis of the fight against terrorism.
Participants at the conference include representatives of the Member States of the Conference Advisory Board of UNCCT as well as representatives from 21 countries from the European Union and 28 global centers to combat terror. The UN will be an observer at the conference.The conference will discuss enhanced coordination and coherence of counterterrorism efforts of the United Nations. It will also review the counter terrorism projects undertaken by various entities under the UN and make recommendations to achieve full cooperation between all organizations working in the field of counter terrorism.
The Kingdom’s delegation to the conference will include experts in counter terrorism and intellectual security from the Ministry of Interior and the Foreign Ministry.
The Kingdom hosted the first conference on counter terrorism in Riyadh in 2005. It was in that conference that Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, then crown prince at the time, called on the international community to set up an international center to combat terror under the umbrella of the UN. During that meeting, all the participating countries agreed to cooperate in fighting terror in any form and approved the UN as the primary platform for international cooperation against terror. The 2005 conference also declared that no particular religion or region could be blamed for terror attacks. It also called for strengthening the values of mutual understanding and tolerance and multi-lateral dialogues and close relations between different cultures besides combating all kinds of ideologies that promote hatred, intolerance and violence.
