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Commission publishes counter-terrorism strategy

Fundraising | Gemma Ware | 2 Jan 2008

Charity Commission officials are to go on overseas site visits to charities working in areas at high risk from terrorism and will strengthen their arrangement with law enforcement agencies, as part of a new counter-terrorism strategy.

The Commission’s strategy will take a four-pronged approach, focusing on awareness-raising, oversight and supervision of charities in high-risk areas, co-operation with law enforcement agencies and other government regulators, and intervention to disrupt the abuse of charities for terrorist purposes.

As part of the new strategy, which emphasises the need to provide support and guidance to prevent abuse from occurring in the first place, the Commission plans to update and add to its guidance on charities and terrorism, including on charities’ legal obligations under terrorism laws and on good financial controls such as verifying the end use of funds sent overseas.

It also plans to consult further with the sector on how to define the standards of a ‘know your beneficiary’ principle for charities and how it could be applied.

The publication of the Commission’s strategy, just before Christmas, followed the government’s publication of a summary of responses to a joint Home Office and Treasury consultation on the safeguards in place to protect charities from the terrorist threat.

In the recommendations, which were virtually unchanged from those made in the original review put out for consultation in May 2007, the government rejected calls to introduce a ‘good faith defence’ to protect trustees if their charities inadvertently came into contact with terrorist organisations when delivering humanitarian aid, saying it did not believe such a defence was “necessary or indeed justifiable”.

However, in its draft counter-terrorism strategy the Commission hinted that if trustees acted “reasonably and honestly” it may be more flexible when deciding whether to take regulatory action against them.

Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the NCVO, said it was disappointed at the government’s decision not to introduce the good faith defence. “There are real concerns that the fear of criminalisation could deter legitimate humanitarian work in certain parts of the world,” he said. 

The government said that while intelligence agencies recognised that the scale of terrorist links in the sector was “extremely small in comparison to the size of the charitable sector, the risk of exploitation of charities is a significant aspect of the terrorist finance threat”.

However, Martin Hearson, sector advocacy officer at BOND, said the government had overstated the risk. “I think there’s a real danger that what the government will end up doing is alienating the very organisations it wants to get at, because if it maintains this rhetoric, the likelihood is that charities are going to be very switched off by it and they’re not going to view it in a positive and constructive light.”

Hearson said the Commission now needed to walk a fine line between keeping the government and the sector happy. “We absolutely want them to give us guidance on how to meet our legal obligations, but at the same time, we also want them to take a step back from the more detailed best practice work that should come from within the sector. We don’t want the intervention to be too heavy-handed.”

A Commission spokesman said that while all charities were potentially vulnerable to the threat of abuse by terrorists, its strategy would not be “a one size fits all”.  A village hall, for instance, would be at a much lower risk than a charity working in an area known to have links to proscribed terrorist organisations.

The Commission’s new strategy will largely be funded by an extra £1m allocated to the Commission last year to combat terrorism. Some general Commission resources will also be redirected to specific departments when staff skills are particularly required.

While the Commission has not launched a full public consultation on the new strategy, it is seeking views from interested parties before 29 February.

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