UN to try again on stalled anti-terror treaty

UNITED NATIONS, Friday (Reuters) World governments, spurred by suicide bombings in London, will try once again later this month to break a years-long impasse over a global treaty against terrorism, a key diplomat said on Thursday.

The U.N. General Assembly's treaty-writing legal committee will hold a fresh round of informal negotiations during the week of July 25 in renewed bid to move the pact forward, committee chairman Mohamed Bennouna of Morocco told Reuters. The United Nations already has 13 treaties intended to counter various aspects of terrorism.

But the draft "comprehensive convention on international terrorism" has been stalled in the legal committee since 1996, where negotiations have repeatedly bogged down over how to define terrorism. After last week's deadly suicide bombings in London, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan once again pressed the 191 U.N. member states to use a world summit in New York in September to put their differences behind them.

The dispute has centered on what constitutes a terrorist act and in particular how to classify Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli military actions in the West Bank and Gaza, with some nations arguing that one country's terrorist was another's freedom fighter. In recent negotiations, some countries questioned whether the definition would apply to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.