Ahead of the Financial Action Task Force’s plenary meeting scheduled to be held later this month, many countries said that Pakistan has not done enough to be “white-listed” for terror-sponsoring which makes Islamabad’s prospects of exiting the grey list dim.
According to The Taiwan Times, in 2018, the country was placed in the list of “jurisdictions under increased monitoring”, more popularly known as the Grey List and was given an Action Plan comprising 27 Action Items for compliance pertaining to prosecutions, money laundering, terrorism financing, and targeted financial sanctions to choke the flow of funds to designated terrorist organisations, terrorists and their associates.
“Although Pakistan claims that it has complied with 24 out of the 27 Items and largely complied with the remaining three too, making it eligible for “whitelisting”, countries that objectively evaluate its performance still believe that enough has not been done, especially when it comes to stopping the fund collection activities of proscribed groups and prosecution of terrorists for actual acts of terrorism,” wrote Paul Antonopolous, a Ph.D. candidate for The Taiwan Times.
“Pakistan has been skirting the issue of prosecution by repeatedly convicting a small set of individuals on terrorism financing charges, giving them concurrent sentences instead of cumulative, and totally ignoring their involvement in major terrorist cases,” he added.
Despite having friendly countries in the Asia Pacific-Joint Group of the FATF, Islamabad has failed to make the cut, he said adding that Islamabad’s prospects of exiting the Grey List are “dim given the unfettered fund raising activities of proscribed terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) / Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and their affiliates.”
“Pakistan‘s main argument has been that the FATF process, which is supposed to be technical, is being politicised by a few countries to demand more than what is required,” he said.
