Sudan releases rights delegates
Jan 22, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Sudanese authorities released around 50 delegates from local and international human rights groups after storming their meeting on the sidelines of an African Union summit on Sunday, delegates at the meeting said.
Activists said the security forces’ action called into question Sudan’s right to host the summit.
“They have now all been released,” said Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a Sudanese human rights activist who has previously been arrested by the government.
Osman Hummaida from the Sudanese Organisation Against Torture (SOAT) was inside the meeting. He said a group of security men entered and demanded to see the agenda and list of delegates.
“Everyone is being detained and we have been asked not to talk on the phone. We have not been told why we are being held,” he had told Reuters. The meeting was to discuss closer cooperation with the AU on human rights issues.
Representatives of Amnesty International, Anti-Slavery International and the International Bar Association were among those being held, Hummaida said.
“They cannot be hosting a summit while they have this kind of conflict and they cannot be the chairperson of the African Union,” Adam said.
The European Union ambassador in Khartoum, Kent Dagerfeld, told Reuters this was a step backwards for Sudan, where freedom of movement and press had improved recently.
Journalists were told by police and state security officers to leave the building, next door to the Ministry for Humanitarian Affairs, and one had his recording equipment seized, a Reuters witness said.
Sudan, facing accusations of human rights abuses, is hosting the summit for the first time and is trying to persuade African leaders to back its bid to be president of the 53-member body.
The action by the security forces took place hours after Sudan signed up to an AU peer review mechanism, designed to reinforce good governance in Africa.
Khartoum’s bid to chair the AU has provoked criticism from rights groups, which say it would make a mockery of AU efforts to bring peace to Sudan’s Darfur region.
It has also aroused disquiet among some African countries that want to improve the continent’s image, with diplomats saying southern, western and central Africa had been working behind the scenes to ask Sudan to withdraw its candidacy.
One of Sudan’s few opposition daily newspapers was originally banned from covering the meetings of African nations because it published an editorial saying President Omar Hassan al-Bashir should not become AU chairman.
The front page of the Citizen newspaper on Saturday was covered with a huge cartoon of a Sudanese with his lips locked shut under the headline: “Authorities told the Citizen no way to AU summit coverage.”
Editor-in-chief Nhial Bol said he had since been given permission to attend the official opening on Monday. “But they told me the matter was not over and they’d deal with me when the summit finished,” he said.
(Reuters)