Iran approves UN convention needed to get off FATF blacklist
Iran has approved the last of 40 recommendations issued by the global financial crime watchdog FATF, which requires the country to join a United Nations convention on terrorism financing to get off the body’s blacklist.
Members of Iran’s Expediency Council on Wednesday voted in favor of efforts by the country’s administrative government to join the 1999 UN Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism (CFT).
The vote came after rounds of discussions in the Council, which comprises more than 40 politicians, former officials, and senior clerics. The body is responsible for settling disputes between the Iranian parliament, which has endorsed the CFT, and the Guardian Council, which has rejected it.
Council spokesman Mohsen Dehnavi said in a post on the X platform that the Council had approved the CFT with the reservation that Iran would implement the measure within the limits of its constitution and domestic laws.
The Financial Action Task Force, an international coalition for combating money laundering and terrorist financing, headquartered in Paris, blacklisted Iran in 2020 mainly because it had failed to adopt the CFT and the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, also known as the Palermo Convention.
After halting debates on the two conventions several years ago over fears they might undermine Iran’s financial independence, the Expediency Council approved the Palermo convention in May.
However, Iranian Finance Ministry officials have repeatedly said that the FATF would start to reconsider its designation of Iran only after the country approves the CFT.
Iran’s push to get off FATF’s blacklist comes days after it came under UN sanctions for alleged non-compliance with the terms of a 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers, known as the JCPOA.
The sanctions came after Britain, France, and Germany, as three signatories to the JCPOA, triggered a clause in the agreement allowing the re-imposition of six UN Security Council resolutions that had been adopted between 2006 and 2010.
Iran is also subject to a harsh regime of sanctions by the United States since 2018, when Washington withdrew from the JCPOA.
However, economic experts believe Iran should be removed from FATF’s blacklist if it wants to maintain its normal trade and business relations with countries that reject UN and US sanction policies against Tehran.
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