MNA – The Expediency Council’s Saturday meeting on joining the UN Convention on Transnational Crime (Palermo bill) ended without conclusion, leaving the fate of the bill unknown for at least two more weeks, a member of the council said.

According to Gholamreza Mesbahi, the Council held a session today to study the fate of the controversial bill, but the participants but did not reach a consensus, so the final decision was postponed to the council’s next session on March 2.

Mesbahi said lack of enough participants in today’s session made the Council postpone the discussion on the matter to the next session so that all those pro and against joining the convention could share their views.

This is the third session the council deters the decision on the bill for further studies.

The Palermo bill had once been examined in the Guardian Council and then in the high supervisory board of the Expediency Council, where the bodies found some flaws with it and referred it back to the Parliament. However, the Parliament insisted on its endorsement and returned the bill to the Expediency Council for the final verdict.

Together with the bill on Iran’s accession to the convention against the funding of terrorism (CFT), Palermo is a controversial FATF-related bill that Iran has been requested to endorse in order to join the anti-money laundering watchdog and get off the body’s blacklist.

The Palermo bill needs at least two third of the votes to be endorsed by the Expediency Council.