ROME: The Vatican will not participate in US President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” its secretary of state said on Tuesday.
The board, of which Trump is the chairman, was initially designed to oversee the Gaza truce and the territory’s reconstruction after the war between Hamas and Israel.
But its purpose has since morphed into resolving all sorts of international conflicts, triggering fears the US president wants to create a rival to the United Nations.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin said that the UN manages the world’s top crises.
“For us, there are... some critical issues that should be resolved, let’s say,” he said.
“That is, at the international level, it is above all the UN that manages these crisis situations,” he said. “This is one of the, one of the points on which we have insisted.”
Since Trump launched his “Board of Peace” at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, at least 19 countries have signed its founding charter.
Countries have been asked to pay $1 billion for permanent membership, and the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country invaded Ukraine in 2022, has drawn criticism.
Vatican says will not partake in Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’
https://arab.news/5w45t
Vatican says will not partake in Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’
- Cardinal Pietro Parolin said that the UN manages the world’s top crises
- Countries have been asked to pay $1 billion for permanent membership in the board
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
