A TUNISIAN man resident in Ireland has been removed from the UN Security Council’s al-Qaeda sanctions list after a decade of legal challenges to clear his name.
The UN announced on Monday its al-Qaeda sanctions committee was deleting the name of Shafiq ben Mohamed ben Mohamed al-Ayadi from the list after concluding its considerations of the delisting request submitted by Mr Ayadi to the UN ombudsman tasked with such requests. It gave no reasons for the move.
Mr Ayadi’s delisting means that he is no longer subject to the assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo enforced when an individual is included on the list. In its statement on his delisting, the UN described Mr Ayadi as being associated with the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a charity that has been linked with al-Qaeda.
Mr Ayadi, whose name has been on the UN list since October 2001, was born in the Tunisian city of Sfax in 1963. He moved to Ireland in 1997, and lives in south Dublin with his family.
The UN document which originally outlined the reasons for Mr Ayadi’s listing alleged that he went to Afghanistan in the early 1990s to receive paramilitary training. It also claimed that he met Osama bin Laden on a number of occasions in the 1990s, including in Sudan, and worked for the European branch of another charity linked with al-Qaeda.
In 2006, he lost an appeal in the European Court of First Instance against an EU order freezing his assets. His lawyers had argued that his human rights had been breached because he had been deprived of the ability to work or to earn money since being listed.
The judgment acknowledged that Mr Ayadi denies any involvement with Osama bin Laden.
In December 2009, the European Court of Justice ruled in favour of Mr Ayadi, saying his rights to defence against charges of having links to terrorism had been violated. The court also found that his “fundamental right to respect for property” had not been respected.
Mr Ayadi is one of two individuals resident in the Republic whose names have appeared on the list. The other, Ibrahim Buisir, a Libyan-born naturalised Irish citizen, was added to the list in 2009.
Mr Buisir has sought to challenge his inclusion on the UN list. Human rights groups have long criticised the lack of due process in the UN sanctions listing regime.