The EU will chair the forum from September 2022 to September 2024 and Egypt will hold the chairmanship of the forum from March 2023 to March 2025, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
The Egyptian-EU chairmanship of the GCTF will succeed that of Canada and Morocco, which co-chaired the forum between 2019 and 2021.
Egypt, during its tenure as a co-chairman, intends to build on the special expertise that it enjoys in the field of counter-terrorism in order to advance the implementation of the forum’s strategic vision 2021-2031, the foreign ministry’s statement read.
Egypt will also work on enhancing the effectiveness of the international system to fight terrorism and support the efforts of the member states in implementing the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, the ministry added.
Furthermore, Egypt plans to promote attention to the African continent as well as to the needs of the developing countries, developing the existing coordination with regional mechanism concerned with fighting terrorism, the ministry said.
Egypt will also work on continuing to introduce tangible initiatives within the framework of the forum’s working groups, the ministry added.
GCFT was established in 2011 as a multilateral counter-terrorism platform to exchange experiences and best practices to develop an international system to address terrorism in light of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Strategy.
Egypt is one of the founding countries of the forum, which includes 30 member states.
Five working groups have emerged from the forum, including the capacity building working group for East African countries, which Egypt has co-chaired with the European Union since September 2017.
Egypt had previously chaired the criminal justice and rule of law working group jointly with the United States during the period from 2011 to 2017.
In recent years, Egypt has adopted a comprehensive framework to confront terrorism and extremist thought, which is based on security as well as awareness-raising mechanisms.
Egypt has also pushed for serious and urgent cooperation in Africa to combat cross-border terrorism, founding the Sahel and Sahara Counterterrorism Centre in Cairo to coordinate the efforts of the 20 Sahel-Saharan states (CEN-SAD) to face terror threats.
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