Jody Williams to lead UN rights mission to Darfur
Jan 26, 2007 (GENEVA) — U.S. anti-landmine campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams has been named by the U.N. Human Rights Council to head a team of investigators to report on the slaying of civilians, rapes, destruction of villages and mass flight in Darfur, officials said Friday.
The team of six, which will also include U.N. special envoy to Darfur Sima Samar, former acting U.N. rights chief Bertrand Ramcharan, the ambassadors of Gabon and Indonesia, and Estonian politician Mart Nutt, was appointed after more than a month of protracted diplomatic negotiations.
The 47-nation council agreed on the mission in December during an emergency session on the situation of human rights in the western Sudanese region.
At the time, the council also passed a resolution expressing “concern regarding the seriousness of the human rights and humanitarian situation in Darfur,” but shied away from criticizing the Sudanese government for its role in facilitating the rights abuses.
The members of the mission were due to be announced before the end of last year, but differences between some African and Arab states on the one hand, and Western diplomats on the other, forced council president Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico to revise his list a number of times.
Western governments and human rights campaigners expressed strong concern at the possibility that diplomats involved in the debate within the council would be sent to Darfur, arguing that this would undermine the objectivity of the mission.
“The backbone of the council are its systems of independent experts, so that a fact-finding mission sent by the council should rely heavily precisely on expertise and on independence,” Mariette Grange of Human Rights Watch told The Associated Press.
In the compromise now reached, Patrice Tonda, the ambassador of Gabon to the U.N. in Geneva, and Makarim Wibisono, the ambassador of Indonesia, will be part of the mission.
Top U.N. officials and aid agencies have accused the Sudanese government of supporting the militia groups responsible for the attacks in Darfur _ a charge Khartoum strongly denies.
Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, has also spoken of “credible evidence” that the Sudanese military was responsible for ground attacks and aerial bombardments of civilians.
According to U.N. estimates, more than 200,000 people have been killed and some 2.5 million people have fled their homes since violence broke out between janjaweed militia and ethnic African groups in 2003.
The international community has been pressuring Sudan to allow large numbers of U.N. peacekeepers into the country to replace or at least assist the 7,000-strong African Union operation there.
But Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has so far refused to let in more than a handful of U.N. military and civilian advisers.
The Geneva-based Human Rights Council replaced the widely discredited Human Rights Commission last June. Its resolutions are nonbinding, but increase political pressure on criticized countries.
(AP)