UN debates terrorism

Almost no country in the world has escaped terrorism

		By Greg Barrow BBC correspondent at the UN

The General Assembly of the United Nations gathers later on Monday to begin a week-long debate on terrorism.

Mr Annan will call for existing UN anti-terror conventions to be ratified

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has been invited to give an opening address to this gathering of UN member nations, which was called together in the aftermath of the attacks on Washington and New York last month.

Delegates will be urged to sign and ratify 12 existing UN conventions on terrorism that were largely ignored before the attacks on America last month.

They will also look at speeding up the adoption of a new global convention that has been proposed by the Indian Government.

'Talking shop'

Some call it a glorified talking shop of world leaders, but the general assembly is set to get down to the real business of addressing the global threat of terrorism.

Almost no country in the world has escaped untouched from terrorist acts, and delegates from UN member states will be relating their experiences and their suggestions about how to deal with the problem.

In recognition of his role as the mayor of the city where the UN headquarters are based and his performance in dealing with what has been described as the worst terrorist attack in history, Mayor Giuliani has been invited to open the debate.

Then Secretary-General Kofi Annan will speak.

Loopholes

There is hope that this gathering will give added momentum to an Indian initiative to adopt a new global convention on terrorism that would close many of the loopholes in existing international law.

Work towards this convention has been bogged down in arguments over the definition of terrorism, centering on the old dispute that one person's terrorist may be another person's freedom fighter.

Indian diplomats say this problem can be resolved by defining what constitutes an act of terrorism as anything that goes beyond the Geneva Conventions on war.