The Group of 20 countries has unanimously adopted an action plan aimed at cutting off what they call terrorists’financing networks. At the end of the two-day annual meeting of the Group of 20 countries in Ottawa this weekend, topfinance officials from industrialized and developing countries adopted a plan to freeze the assets of what they callterrorists and their associates and close their access to the international financial system.

The action plan was adopted while thousands of protesters demonstrated outside. It also calls on all members to closetheir access to the international financial system, and make public the lists of so-called terrorists whose assetsare being frozen. G20 member countries also committed to ratifying the UN Convention against Transnational OrganizedCrime and the UN Convention for the Suppression of Financing Terrorism.

While the G20 will take special collective measures against terrorism, the International Monetary Fund will not. The183-member organization decided yesterday that it is not within the IMF’s mandate or capacity to police the worldfinancial systems, but urged all members to adopt the United Nations’ anti-terrorist-financing measures.

But outside the meeting, the Ottawa-based September Eleventh Peace Coalition and anti-corporate globalization groupsheld a mass demonstration for Global Peace and Justice. They called on the Canadian government to withdraw CanadianForces from military action and to re-assess WTO, IMF and World Bank agreements and policies based on peace.

Organizers of protests against the G-20, World Bank, and IMF meetings held a “teach-in” last weekend. Among thespeakers was Oronto Douglas of Nigeria, the Deputy Director of Environmental Rights Action, a partnership withFriends of the Earth. Douglas was a member of the legal team that defended Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nobel prize-winningactivist who was murdered in 1995 by the Nigerian military dictatorship, with support from the Shell Oil Corporation.

Tape:

• Oronto Douglas, Deputy Director of Environmental Rights Action, human rights activist and lawyer.

Related link:

• Environmental Rights Action