Courtesy of the Counterterrorism Blog:

By Victor Comras

Following up on a recommendation contained in last year’s UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, the UN has put together a new on-line “counter-terrorism” handbook which is meant to help guide countries wishing to assess UN counter-terrorism support services. As the UN Counter-Terrorism Handbook Site states:

This site has been created to provide Member States with current and relevant information on the United Nations’ and its entities’ work and resources contributing to countering terrorism. A number of different search functions are provided to help you better determine and access the information you need….The United Nations Counter-Terrorism Online Handbook is an initiative that arose from the call of the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy … to “ensure overall coordination and coherence in the counter-terrorism efforts of the United Nations system. Combining information from the { 22-member Counter-Terrorism Implementation} Task Force, the Online Handbook provides Member States, UN country teams, and relevant institutions with information available {from} United Nations counter-terrorism related resources.

While this new “handbook” represents more form than substance, it certainly makes it a lot easier to access and identify what’s actually going on within the the 22 different UN agencies, offices and committees that touch on some aspect of counter-terrorism. Unfortunately, when it comes to substance, the information and data now available is quite paltry.

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