In February, the Global NPO Coalition on FATF, spearheaded by ECNL/ICNL and partners, was invited to participate with four seats at the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) Private Consultative Forum (PCF).
This development is a key step in the Coalition’s engagement with FATF, assuring that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) will now have a permanent voice in important discussions.
It also fulfills one of the FATF pledges to deepen its engagement with civil society. The invite comes after the success of the regional workshop on the implementation of FATF’s standards for NPOs, organized by ECNL and partners, and the expressed willingness of FATF, non-profit sector and government representatives to continue mutual exchange on implementation issues.
The PCF is an annual meeting, hosted by FATF, where issues affecting various sectors and entities subject to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CFT) obligations are discussed. According to FATF, these meetings allow the multilateral body to “learn more about the private sector perspective of certain AML/CFT requirements, while the private sector can use this forum to raise issues with the FATF.”
Until now, the non-profit sector has never been invited to formally participate in the PCF, despite the fact that these meetings regularly discuss issues directly impacting NPOs.
The four seats will be held by one co-chair of the Global Coalition, an NPO legal expert, a representative of philanthropy/grantmaking and one service delivery/humanitarian assistance organization. Over the next two years, those slots will be filled by the Human Security Collective (HSC) as Co-Chair of the NPO coalition, the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL) on behalf of the ICNL Alliance, the European Foundation Centre on behalf of the Worldwide Initiative for Grantmaker Support (WINGS), and the Norwegian Refugee Council as a representative of service delivery/humanitarian assistance organisations. The next PCF will be held in mid-March in Vienna and will include one full day of workshops on the implementation of FATF standards on NPOs, as a continuation of the previous workshop discussions.