Global Policy Forum

Several U.N. Security Council nations expressed misgivings about a draft resolution introduced by Russia on Monday that would create a new blacklist of terrorist suspects subject to extradition. While publicly members of the 15-nation council greeted the Russian draft warmly, diplomats said the United States and others had problems with an expanded council blacklist, now confined to Taliban and al Qaeda suspects.

China welcomed the resolution without reservations. Its U.N. Ambassador Guangya Wang told Reuters: "We will have no difficulties with the draft." But Wang said several governments objected to the list. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the initiative in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week, after a spate of bloody attacks by Chechen rebels including the bombing of two airliners and the deadly Beslan school siege.

Without naming states such as Britain and Qatar that have given asylum to Chechen rebels and fugitives from Russia, he rebuked countries for giving such people asylum or playing "geopolitical games" with the fight against terrorism. The resolution seeks to speed the handover of people accused of abusing their status as political refugees to organize or finance terrorist acts.

It recommends compiling a consolidated U.N. list of individuals, groups and entities involved in terrorism, who would be subject to an assets freeze, an arms embargo and "expedited extradition." "This is a case of extraditing first and asking questions later," one European council delegate said.

The measure also attempts to define terrorism, which the 191-member Assembly has been unable to do for years, holding up a treaty on the subject. Algeria's U.N. ambassador, Abdalla Baali, the security council's only Arab member, said, "As long as we are not able to agree on a definition of terrorism, between acts of terrorism and the fight for liberation, it will be hazardous to open the list."

"If you want to widen the list you are going to open a Pandora's box. Everyone will put on the list his enemies," Baali told Reuters. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters last week he was still studying the measure. But he indicated problems with the U.N. Security Council mandating that anyone given asylum in the United States could be expelled.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw supported the initiative and said Britain would "work closely" with Russia on the wording to prevent terrorists from abusing asylum status. But he said that neither Britain nor any other European Union nation would return suspects to face the death penalty.

The draft resolution defines terrorism as "acts against civilians with the intent to cause death or serious bodily harm." It says such deeds are "under no circumstances justifiable by consideration of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature."

In his address to the assembly, Lavrov, a former U.N. ambassador, called for an end to "double standards" and said: "Those who slaughtered children in Beslan and hijacked airplanes to attack America are creatures of the same breed." Western governments say Moscow should seek a political solution in Chechnya, but President Vladimir Putin has vowed to crush the separatist rebels and equated calls to talk peace with them to negotiating with Islamic militant Osama bin Laden.