Germany confronts terrorist financing amid legal challenges

Terrorist groups depend on money as an essential variable to meet their needs to continue the military and livelihood activities of their elements, as well as to expand geographically. Therefore, cutting off the means of funding means undermining the spread of terrorism internationally.

In the context of terrorist groups’ keenness to keep the means of financing extended, they select geographical areas that are either unprofessional or that their laws enjoy a degree of privacy and protection, which they then exploit. In this regard, Europe is striving to prevent the use of its legal and financial tools as a means to pass money to extremists, especially Germany, which imposes rigorous restrictions on currency trading and economic transactions, including those traded via electronic networks, to prevent their use in financing violence.

Fighting the financing of terrorism in Germany

German security services implemented various decisions in this context to undermine the growth of extremism and its financing. On October 6, 2021, the police raided apartments and offices in North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony and Bremen, with dozens of suspects arrested.

The security authorities in Germany announced that the raids took place as a result of suspicions of a dubious financing network working in money laundering and drug trafficking and used to finance terrorism in Syria, adding that there were data on financial transfers worth more than €100 million that reached Syria and Turkey through suspicious deals.

This refers us to the suspicious relations that arise between organized crime gangs and terrorist groups, as the two currents derive from each other factors of secrecy and ways of discharging dubious funds as secret financing corridors. The European Union expressed its concern about the eruption of these relations and their impact on security in the region during a meeting of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in April 2021.

The Committee signed a mandatory memorandum to address the challenges arising from cooperation between terrorist groups and organized crime gangs that operate in human trafficking, drugs or weapons, as the Council of Europe believes that criminal gangs that facilitate trade in contraband act as an essential link within terrorist financing programs.

For its part, the Council of Europe Committee on Counter-Terrorism (CDCT) has adopted 48 new legal rules to combat cooperation between crime syndicates and terrorist groups in order to address emerging concerns about the impact of such cooperation on security in the region, because this cooperation, if it occurs, will make it difficult to track security operations of extremist operations, their chances of occurrence, and their financing mechanisms.

In January 2021, the Public Prosecutor issued a decision to arrest a suspect for his involvement in financing terrorism in Syria, amid information that the suspect had participated in a network operating through social networking sites to collect donations and then deliver them to extremist groups in Syria.

Legal challenges in countering the financing of terrorism

Germany, like other European countries, faces a legal problem in confronting extremist groups. Given the element of historical modernity that characterizes transcontinental groups, confronting them legally requires a new adaptation of legal rules, which is what faces the European Union countries that are committed to several covenants to preserve human rights and freedom.

Western countries, such as Germany, France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, have recently tried to enact a set of new laws to confront their problems with terrorism, but these countries have faced human rights tensions and social debates about the contradictions between the new laws and human rights values, which is what Germany has been facing since its approval of a package of new articles to combat the growth of extremism.