[Al Arabiya Latest] Dozens of terrorism suspects remain on a United Nations sanctions list despite having likely died and information on others is so scant as to render their inclusion useless, a U.N. ambassador said on Tuesday.
These flaws make it tough to impose bans on people and companies on the list linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, even as new threats emerge in countries like Somalia, said Thomas Mayr-Harting, who chairs the U.N. Security Council's al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee.
Of 513 entries on the list which includes 402 people and 111 companies, 38 people were reported or believed to be dead, Mayr-Harting, who is also Austria's ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters.
| My rough calculation makes that error rate less than 10%, which is pretty good, under the circumstances. But we can't expect UN types to grasp even very elementary statistics. |
"It is not the purpose of the list to contain dead people," he said, adding that as much as a third of the list is basically useless because the information available is too sketchy for law enforcement officials to act on.
| A one third uselessness rate is significant, if indeed that's a real number. "As much as" is a fairly meaningless statement. |
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