In February 2019, the IIJ convened a workshop in Malta under the auspices of the IIJ Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters Initiative, and with support from the Government of the United States, focused on Criminal Justice Responses to Returning or Repatriated Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs) and their Accompanying Family Members. The workshop brought together more than fifty practitioners, including judges, prosecutors, investigators, prison officials, and rehabilitation and reintegration specialists from Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, France, Germany, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, Kosovo, Northern Macedonia, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, the Netherlands, Niger, Nigeria, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uzbekistan, and several multilateral and international organisations.
The workshop focused on practical approaches to assessing, investigating, prosecuting, adjudicating, rehabilitating, and reintegrating RFTFs and their accompanying family members and, in so doing, support implementation of the GCTF's Good Practices on Addressing the Challenge of Returning Families of Foreign Terrorist Fighters (endorsed by GCTF Ministers in September 2018). The workshop also drew on good practices articulated in other GCTF framework documents, such as The Hague-Marrakech Memorandum on Good Practices for a More Effective Response to the FTF Phenomenon and the Addendum focusing on returning FTFs, the Rome Memorandum on Good Practices for Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Violent Extremist Offenders and the Addendum on legal frameworks, as well as the Neuchâtel Memorandum on Good Practices for Juvenile Justice in a Counterterrorism Context.
Workshop sessions addressed the full spectrum of criminal justice responses that can be used to address returning FTFs and their accompanying families, including: strategies to effectively detect and handle returnees and their families; relevant evidentiary challenges and means to address these challenges; specialised risk and needs assessments for women and juveniles; and various rehabilitation and re-entry programs in custodial and non-custodial settings.
For more information on this workshop or the IIJ RFTFs Initiative, please contact Director, Programmatic Unit, Gail Malone.