The ICJ submitted its observations to the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on Terrorism (CODEXTER) on the draft Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism.
The draft Convention would criminalize ‘public provocation to commit acts of terrorism’ as well as ‘training’ and ‘recruitment of terrorists’. It also suggests a number of vaguely defined preventive policy obligations. In its submission the ICJ made inter alia the following recommendations:
- To ensure full respect in the draft Convention for international law, including international human rights law and humanitarian law (article 2);
- To revise the obligations on preventive policies in article 3; most notably the obligation to encourage the public to provide factual and specific information in paragraph 4;
- To revise the crime of ‘public provocation to commit an act of terrorism’ to ensure compliance with the nullum crime sine lege principle and to ensure a sufficiently clear and predictable separation between recognizable criminal behavior and the legitimate expression of political and social dissent;
- To strengthen the limited scope of concrete obligations of states with regard to the rights of victims contained in article 12 of the Convention (protection, compensation and support of victims of terrorism);
- To exclude the death penalty as sanction for the crimes contained in the draft Convention;
- To ensure that the extradition and mutual legal assistance clauses fully reflect international law and reflect sufficiently human rights guarantees;
The full text of the submission can be downloaded as a pdf document.
Submission of comments on the Draft Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism [full text, PDF]