UN General Assembly
1996

Efforts need also to be made to further strengthen and give legal effect to the 1994 Declaration on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism. Now we need more than a mere declaration; we need a convention on measures to combat terrorism. Concerted international cooperation is necessary to ensure that the terrorist does not enjoy safe havens anywhere in the world. The territory of no State should be permitted to be used in any manner that would encourage or sustain terrorist activity in another. Fund-raising activity on foreign soil in particular, either directly or indirectly through so-called charitable funds, must be prohibited. Should terrorism be permitted through international apathy to fester, it would poison the international body politic, enervating democratic processes, processes the international community is obliged to sustain. It would be myopic for a nation to stand aloof or to disown responsibility for combating acts of terrorism which may seem too distant to evoke anything more than curiosity. With the English poet John Donne, I would say, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for