A/HRC/45/27 security considerations should be strictly evidence-based and subject to appropriate independent review. Despite restricted access to crime scenes in Iraq and in the Syrian Arab Republic, information continues to emerge about activities and conduct committed by individual foreign fighters, which assists in building criminal cases against returned fighters and prosecuting them. That includes information collected by the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism to Assist in the Investigation and Prosecution of Persons Responsible for the Most Serious Crimes under International Law Committed in the Syrian Arab Republic since March 2011 and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. 40. Some former fighters who have returned to European Union member States in particular have been investigated and prosecuted for terrorism charges, such as membership of a terrorist organization. In a minority of cases from various European Union member States, foreign fighters were prosecuted at the same time for terrorism offences and other international crimes, such as war crimes.69 According to the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, the cumulative effect of counter-terrorism and war crime charges results in longer sentences in the event of conviction. 70 In addition, some States have initiated the creation of specialized war crimes units with the purpose of prosecuting international crimes and terrorism-related offences.71 C. Rights of victims 41. Acts of terrorism continue to take a significant toll on people’s lives, physical and mental integrity and security. Terrorism takes place both within national territory and across borders, generating mass destruction and displacement. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the geographic breadth of the impact of terrorism has not declined in recent years, with 103 countries recording at least one terrorist incident in 2018, and 71 countries suffering at least one fatality in the same year.72 Women and girls in particular are often targeted directly by terrorist groups and subjected to gender-based violence, including human trafficking, rape, forced prostitution and forced marriage. 42. Victims of terrorism and their families have a right to an effective remedy and full reparation, and the corresponding State obligations include a duty to exclude any possibility of impunity for acts of terrorism.73 States should systematically open a prompt, thorough, effective and independent investigation into each terrorist attack. 74 The Human Rights Committee has stressed that States parties are under a due diligence obligation to take reasonable, positive measures that do not impose disproportionate burdens on them in response to reasonably foreseeable threats to life originating from private persons and entities, including armed or terrorist groups, whose conduct is not attributable to the State. 75 43. Victims of human rights violations, including those committed in the context of countering terrorism, have a right to an effective remedy and full reparation. That right is 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 12 States over children and their guardians in camps, prisons, or elsewhere in the northern Syrian Arab Republic”, para. 3. European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust), Cumulative prosecution of foreign terrorist fighters for core international crimes and terrorism-related offences (2020), p. 26; and Trial International, Universal Jurisdiction Annual Review 2020 – Terrorism and international crimes: prosecuting atrocities for what they are (2020), p. 12. Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, “Analytical brief: the prosecution of ISILassociated women”, p. 4. For example, A/HRC/40/52/Add.4, para. 16; www.hrw.org/report/2014/09/16/long-armjustice/lessons-specialized-war-crimes-units-france-germany-and; and https://redress.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/03/UJAR_2018.pdf, pp. 8–10. See http://visionofhumanity.org/app/uploads/2019/11/GTI-2019web.pdf. A/74/790, para. 14. A/HRC/20/14, paras. 33–34. Human Rights Committee, general comment No. 36, para. 21. See also A/66/310, para. 20.