India to host UNSC meet on cyber terror in Oct, 2022.

August 5, 2022

Threat of terrorists using emerging technologies and ways to deal with it will top the agenda of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) meeting to be hosted by India in October. It is a rare occasion when such a high-profile meeting is held outside the United Nations, New York.
The meeting is scheduled for October 29 and will see members of the 15-nation UNSC deliberating on counter-terrorism measures.
India chairs the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) for2022. Countries like the US, China and Russia are likely to attend the conclave. India is halfway through the second year of its two-year term as an elected non-permanent member of the UN Security Council.
India’s tenure at the Council will end in December when the country will also preside as President of the powerful UN organ for the month.
The current members of the UNSC are Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Norway and the UAE, along with five permanent members China, France, Russia, the UK and the US.
The special meeting will specifically focus on three significant areas where emerging technologies are experiencing rapid development, growing use by member states (including for security and counter-terrorism purposes), and the increasing threat of abuse for terrorism purposes, namely Internet and social media, terrorism financing, and unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
It is not very frequent that the Counter-Terrorism Committee meets outside of New York but the meeting in India will be the seventh time that this is happening.
The most recent special meeting of the CTC outside of United Nations headquarters took place in Madrid, Spain, in July 2015, focusing on foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs).
The Committee said further that with the prevalence of technology and rapid rise in digitisation, the use of new and emerging technologies to counter-terrorism is a topic of growing interest among the member states, policymakers and researchers, particularly in the context of the increasing role played by technology in terrorism and counter-terrorism.
The special meeting would be conducted in the six official languages of the United Nations and be open to the wider United Nations membership and other relevant stakeholders.
India’s then Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador T S Tirumurti had in January this year assumed the Chair of the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee for 2022. Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj, the country’s new envoy to the UN, now assumes that role.