Mike Smith
Mike Smith was until July 2013, Assistant Secretary-General and Executive Director of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, a position he held for more than 5 years. Prior to that he was Australia’s Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism. From 2002 to 2006, Mike Smith was Australia’s Permanent Representative to the UN and the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Amongst other responsibilities over this period, in 2004 he was elected Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, one of the most demanding chairing positions in the multilateral system. For most of the period 1998 to 2002, Mike Smith was Chief of Staff to the Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer. Earlier he served as Australia’s Ambassador to Algeria and Tunisia, (1989 – 1991) and to Egypt, Sudan and Algeria (1995 – 1998).
In 2014, Theresa May, then Home Secretary, presented to Parliament a series of Impact Assessments examining the benefits for the United Kingdom of continuing its participation within the European Union’s security and policing arrangements such as Europol, the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) and the second generation Schengen Information System (SIS II). The conclusions reached were […]
Over the course of recent weeks, the Islamic State (IS) announced that it had established a new province in India, the wilayah of Hind, after attacks on security forces in the Kashmir region. IS has also been responsible for an uptick of attacks in Pakistan under the auspices of the wilayah of Pakistan. The attacks […]
When troops of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” conquered areas of northern Iraq in August 2014, they turned against the religious minorities in the region, particularly against the Yazidis, with extreme brutality. Many men were executed; women and children were kidnapped and often systematically raped. IS specifically targeted children and adolescents, who were torn away from […]