Guyana improves on Global Terrorism Index

Dec 21, 2018 News

Guyana has managed to perform well enough to currently rank 128 from 117 last year in the Global Terrorism Index of the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a global thinktank headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
The country’s score on the index, where lower is better, went from 0.154 in 2017 to 0.076 in 2018, a more than 50 percent improvement. On a list of categorizations, where 8-10 is listed as Very High and 0.000 is listed as No Impact, Guyana’s risk of terrorism was listed as very low, the best of any CARICOM state and the second best in South America, behind Bolivia, which poses no terrorist threat or contribution to terrorism.
The most notable changes made by Guyana, with relation to terrorism, in 2018, is the amendment to the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act Bill in July last, the fourth amendment to the legislation in three years.
Among the changes, the Bill was meant to effect is the dismantling of the Anti-Money Laundering Authority, to be replaced by the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism and Proliferation Financing National Coordination Committee (AML/CFT/PF).
Attorney General Basil Williams had noted that the amendments for the coordination of the committee would satisfy a Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendation – that countries should designate an authority to have a coordination or other mechanism that is responsible for national (AML/CFT/PF) policies.
According to the Bill, some of the functions of the committee include the development of the national AML/CFT/PF policies informed by the risks identified by the National Risk Assessment (NRA) and to develop a national action plan, which includes recommendations on effective mechanisms to enable the competent authorities in Guyana to cooperate and coordinate with each other concerning the development and implementation of policies and activities to combat money laundering terrorist financing and proliferation financing.
Additional information provided in the Global Terrorism Index states that countries with Very High risk contribution to global terrorism are Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, Pakistan and Somalia. Unfortunately, Guyana’s Caribbean partner, Jamaica, made one of the most significant jumps, moving backward, landing at 94 on the ranking. Trinidad and Tobago placed close to Guyana, at Rank 125.
Notably, Venezuela, currently experiencing a humanitarian crisis, which sparked mass migration in every direction, fell back one place to rank 55.
The only country of the Americas, listed as a High to Very High Threat is the United States of America, moving backward 12 places to rank 20. The country has experienced widespread cases of harassment and assault by emboldened white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-nazis since Donald Trump assumed the presidency in 2016. The country has also seen an increase in school shootings, though it has been disputed whether those incidents are considered as terrorism.
The Global Terrorism index states that defining terrorism is not a straightforward matter, because there is no single, internationally accepted definition of what constitutes terrorism. The GTI has settled on the definition that terrorism is ‘the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation.
The global terrorism index ranks 163 countries based on four indicators weighted over five years. A country’s annual GTI score is based on a unique scoring system to account for the relative impact of incidents in the year. The factors counted in each country’s yearly score are the total number of terrorist incidents in a given year, the total number of fatalities caused by terrorists, total number of injuries caused by terrorists, and the measure of total property damage from terrorist incidents.

Discover more from Kaieteur News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Latest News