Parliament ratifies bill on terrorism financing

The Turkish Parliament ratified a law on the Prevention of the Financing of Terrorism late on Thursday. According to the new law targeting terrorism financing, those who financially support terrorist networks or collect money on behalf of terrorist organizations will face a sentence from five to 10 years in prison. The government has been under pressure for some time now from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a unit of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to approve this bill in Parliament. The FATF has repeatedly warned that as a member of the FATF group, Turkey should make sufficient progress in implementing its promised action plan to harmonize Turkish laws and decided to suspend Turkish membership as of Feb. 22, 2013, unless Turkey adopted this draft and established a mechanism for identifying and freezing terrorist assets in line with earlier FATF recommendations.