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UN terror suspect list has many flaws: official
[Al Arabiya Latest] Dozens of terrorism suspects remain on a United Nations sanctions list despite having likely died and information on others is so scant as to render their inclusion useless, a U.N. ambassador said on Tuesday.

These flaws make it tough to impose bans on people and companies on the list linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, even as new threats emerge in countries like Somalia, said Thomas Mayr-Harting, who chairs the U.N. Security Council's al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee.

Of 513 entries on the list which includes 402 people and 111 companies, 38 people were reported or believed to be dead, Mayr-Harting, who is also Austria's ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters.
My rough calculation makes that error rate less than 10%, which is pretty good, under the circumstances. But we can't expect UN types to grasp even very elementary statistics.
"It is not the purpose of the list to contain dead people," he said, adding that as much as a third of the list is basically useless because the information available is too sketchy for law enforcement officials to act on.
A one third uselessness rate is significant, if indeed that's a real number. "As much as" is a fairly meaningless statement.

Posted by: Fred 2009-07-16
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=274417