United Nations: France is working on a proposal to ban the chief of the UN-proscribed Jaish-e Muhammad (JeM) Masood Azhar and could move it in the Sanctions Committee after it assumes the Presidency of the powerful UN Security Council next month, sources said.
The rotating monthly Presidency of the 15-nation UN Security Council (UNSC) will go from Equatorial Guinea to France, March 1.
“France is focussed on bringing individual listing requests of JeM terrorists to the 1267 Sanctions Committee soon,” sources said. The proposal, when moved, will be the fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist.
In 2009, India had moved a proposal by itself to designate Azhar. This was followed in 2016 when India moved the proposal with the P3 – the United States, the United Kingdom and France – in the UN’s 1267 Sanctions Committee to ban Azhar, also the mastermind of the attack on the air base in Pathankot in January, 2016.
In 2017, the P3 nations moved a similar proposal again. However, on all occasions China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UNSC, blocked the proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee.
It remains to be seen how China will vote on the proposal this time, following a crucial bilateral meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Wuzhen, where she is participating in the Russia, India, China (RIC) Foreign Ministers meeting.
The French Presidency of the UNSC comes after the 15-nation UN organ under the presidency of Equatorial Guinea had issued a highly significant press statement strongly condemning the Pulwama terror attack.
China had to sign on the February 21 UNSC press statement that ‘condemned in the strongest terms the heinous and cowardly suicide bombing in Jammu and Kashmir, which resulted in over 40 Indian paramilitary forces dead and dozens wounded on February 14, 2019, for which Jaish-e-Mohammed has claimed responsibility’.
On the UNSC press statement condemning the Pulwama attack, a UN diplomat here said that what moved the Security Council was that ‘this is an issue that all the members speak with one voice in the fight against terrorism. Whenever there is an act of terrorism, any where no matter who perpetrates it, it receives the condemnation of not only of the Security Council but of all the international community’.
PTI