In their fight against terrorist financing, EU Member States are not doing enough to combat the main driver of terrorism, experts said on Wednesday 9 November at a conference organised by the European Policy Centre and the European Foundation for Democracy.
According to Stephen Reimer, researcher at the NGO RUSI Europe, Member States are doing a poor job of raising awareness of the risks. “Often our understanding of the risk of terrorist financing is either weak or very reactive”, he said.
“We regard both money laundering, fighting money laundering and terrorist financing as a compliance issue. So very, very often we have banks and supervising authorities like the (national) financial intelligence units, in different countries, ticking off boxes, checking all transfers to Syria, trying to supervise new technologies...”, explained Rebecca Schönenbach, president of the German association VETO! For the Rule of law.
“We do not really face the environment of terrorism, which is extremism, and that relates both to right wing extremism and Islamism”, she continued.
Demir Murat Seyrek, senior policy advisor at the European Foundation for Democracy, said that extremists feed on each other. “When we have those groups, legal ones, NGOs, political parties, and they are behind certain narratives, creating this hatred, creating this ‘us versus them’ narrative that are indirectly creating the environment for those violent extremists and terrorists to organise those attacks”, he explained.
This makes it very difficult to combat terrorist financing. For Mr Reimer, one solution would be to separate the fight against money laundering and the fight against terrorist financing in order to look at the actual threats, the financial dynamics of threats to peace, security and democracy, whether they are designated terrorist organisations, malign influence or active extremism.
Although she agreed with this, Ms Schönenbach stressed that this solution was too difficult to implement. She proposed the introduction of transparency laws, which require the disclosure of funding of entities - such as NGOs or associations - that are funded by the EU or Member States.
Ilkka Salmi, EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, highlighted the work being done on new technologies. Crypto-assets and the meta-world - the set of virtual worlds on the Internet - are major challenges, he says. “These (terrorist) groups could also organise crowdfunding campaigns and fundraising events in the metaverse with virtual music concerts and virtual festivals or entertainment to attract specific targeted people”, he warned. They could also develop their own online financial ecosystems, which would operate in their own metaverse. (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)