UN rights team confident Sudan will allow Darfur visit
Feb 09, 2007 (GENEVA) — The head of a U.N. fact-finding mission said Friday she was confident Sudan would not stand in the way of the team’s visit to the troubled Darfur region next week.
Jody Williams, the U.S. anti-landmine campaigner and Nobel laureate appointed to lead a mission to investigate the reported rape and killing of civilians and the destruction of villages in the western Sudanese region, said she expected Khartoum to provide the necessary travel clearance in the coming days.
“I think it is in the interest of the Sudanese government to provide all of us with visas,” she told reporters in Geneva, the headquarters of the U.N. Human Rights Council which established the mission.
Williams added that the six-member team of human rights experts and diplomats was expecting to receive all documents from Sudan during a four-day stopover in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. It will discuss the situation in Darfur with officials from the African Union, which has a peacekeeping force in the region.
Sudanese officials in Geneva declined to immediately comment on whether the mission would receive the visas.
The mission has been dogged by difficulties since it was agreed on at an emergency session of the 47-nation rights council in December.
The mandate for the visit was painstakingly agreed by Western diplomats on one side and Arab and African diplomats on the other. The council’s resolution ultimately refrained from explicitly criticizing the Sudanese government’s involvement in rights abuses and only expressed concern regarding the seriousness of the situation in Darfur.
More than 200,000 people have been killed and some 2.5 million people have fled their homes since violence broke out in the region between government-backed janjaweed militia and ethnic African groups in 2003.
Some Western governments and rights groups have criticized the team’s inclusion of two council diplomats from countries that prevented censure of Sudan’s government at the council session.
“It is no secret, that there have been contentions about the composition,” said Williams. “But this is the mission composition today.”
She brushed aside fears that Sudan might seek to exert influence over the mission’s work. “This is an independent mission. Nobody is telling us what to think. Nobody is telling us what to say. Nobody is telling us what to write,” Williams said.
The team’s other members are diplomats from Gabon and Indonesia, a U.N. special envoy to Darfur, a former acting U.N. human rights chief and an Estonian rights expert. They will publicly report on their findings at a council session in March.
(AP)