A UN panel has dropped 10 Taliban along with 35 Al Qaeda members and affiliates from its sanctions terror list after its first-ever review of blacklisted names, giving a boost to Afghan President, Mr Hamid Karzai's reconciliation plan. The UN move comes after an 18-month comprehensive review, the first of its kind since the list was created in 1999. Those on the blacklist are subject to travel restrictions and asset freezes. "We really discussed each of these cases substantively on the basis of information provided to us by the Monitoring Team," said Mr Thomas Mayr-Harting, Austria's Ambassador to the UN and the chair of the Security Council panel that maintains the list. "We were able to do the first review after nine years. In 75 per cent of these cases we were able to receive new information," he said. The 488 names were discussed over 38 meetings and finally 45 names were removed from the list. Twenty-four of the removed entries were individuals and 21 were organisations. The 45 names amounted to just under 10 per cent of the entries on the list. In order to facilitate his ambitious political reconciliation plan, Mr Karzai had urged the UN to remove names of some Taliban members from the list. "The purpose of the list is not punitive but preventive," Mayr-Harting said at a news conference on Monday. "The committee decided that there was no longer a need to keep these entries on the list." Mayr-Harting said the 443 names — 132 from Taliban and 311 from Al-Qaeda — were confirmed on the list, though a decision on 66 names was still being debated. "It would be nonetheless unrealistic to expect big movements on the remaining list," said Mayr-Harting, highlighting that 270 names on the list had not been reviewed since 2001. Under the new rules of the sanctions regimes, the names of everyone on the list would have to be reviewed every three years. The list, however, continues to suffer from several anomalies including the presence of names of 30 dead people in it. Recently, eight dead people were removed from the list but the process for delisting names of the deceased is slow. Under the new rules, the names of the dead people have to be reviewed every six months. "It's not easy to get dead people off the list," he pointed out. "We have to have convincing proof that that they are really dead and also we have to have information on what happened to their assets, and this in many cases takes some time, but this is work that will have to continue."