CONFERENCE: GaiaMUN 2018

COMMITTEE: General Assembly

ISSUE: Developing strategies to curb incitement and recruitment of young people by
terrorist organizations;
MAIN SUBMITTER: France
CO-SUBMITTERS: Russian Federation, Belgium, Iraq, UNHCR, Indonesia, UN Women,
Venezuela, Rwanda, Bulgaria

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY,

Recalling Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which reads:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom
to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”,

Keeping in mind the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Working Group Strategic
Communications Initiative which “provides recommendations which are intended to
address violent extremism that is conducive to terrorism in all its forms and
manifestations”,

Emphasizing the Seventh Ministerial Plenary Meeting in New York on 21 September

2016, Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF) in which “the launch of a review and
assessment of existing governmetal best practices and lessons learned in online
prevention and counter-measures to address violent extremism online” was endorsed as
a part of a Global Counter-Terrorism Forum’s Initiative to Address the Life Cycle of
Radicalization to Violence,

Further emphasizing the need for an urgent and swift implementation of policies and
reforms that so as to prevent the youth from being exposed/minimizing the effect of
recruitment propaganda from extremist terrorist organization in the internet as a medium
of communication;
Deeply Alarmed by the fact that according to Our World in Data, there have been 13,488
terrorism-related incidents in 2016 as opposed to 1,813 in the year 2000,

1. Strongly Recommends that all Member States adopt and enforce the national
legislation necessary in order to guarantee the safeguarding of the youth against
the potential eventuality of recruitment into extremist terrorist organizations,
specifically laws that will:
a. Prohibit extremist terroristic propaganda in its entirety,
b. Ensure the presence of a state-approved system of primary and secondary
education available for the all of the citizens aged 7-18;

2. Encourages all Member States to establish a content-based response so as to

counter the use of the Internet for the purposes pursued by the extremist terrorist
organizations (particularly as a medium of recruitment) that includes, but is not
limited to:
a. Collaborative work with private enterprises that would include “content
reporting, removal, filtering and appropriate regulation/legislation”,
b. Further investigation into the suspected online activity of terroristic
organizations aimed at the identification and eventual destruction of its
source;

3. Calls for the creation of a United Nations Counter-Terrorism Collaboration

Communications Unit (UNCCCU) which will assist the various NGOs,
governments and private entities in establishing an effective dialogue that will
achieve international cooperation in order to ensure the minimization of all forms
of terrorist recruitment activity on the World Wide Web;

4. Invites the Member States to uphold the rights to Freedom, Speech and
Expression in the face of an increasingly digitally monitored society and ensure the
 protection of the aforementioned rights established in the UDHR through national
legislation;

5. Suggests the creation of a United Nations Worldwide Educational Counter-

Terrorism Educational Campaign (UNWETEC) which, with the permission of state
authorities and, if permission granted, in close collaboration with relevant NGOs
and the government of a given Member State will:
a. Utilize an effective combination of the modern mass-media medium (the
internet), which will target the younger generations, and the traditional
media (television and radio) in order to raise awareness of the potential
threats to an individual and to a given society as a whole posed by the
activity of terroristic organizations,
b. Cooperate with the ministry of education of a given Member State in order
to integrate anti-manipulation classes into the school curriculum that will:
i. Attempt to gradually form a mindset that is based on critical-thinking
and which will thus allow the youth to identify the instances in which
extremist terrorist organizations may be influencing them (this will be
done primarily through establishing the most common examples of
such recruitment activity),
ii. Encourage students to assist each other in the time periods in which
they are more vulnerable towards recruitment (e.g. psychological
conditions such as depression which is increasingly common
amongst adolescents),
iii. Hold seminars for the parents of the students in order to educate
them on the topic at hand and assist them in case they notice any
irregularities which may indicate that their child is becoming involved
in terrorist activity;

6. Decides to remain actively seized upon the matter.