UN halts rights team to Darfur over Sudan visa bar
Feb 14, 2007 (GENEVA) — A UN human rights mission said on Wednesday it was halting a planned visit to Sudan’s troubled Darfur region after Sudan declined to give them visas.
Sudan’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday it would not give visas to the team, which had hoped to investigate suspected rights abuses in Sudan’s remote west, until it replaced one member who Khartoum said was biased.
UN human rights spokesman Jose Luis Diaz told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday that there had been no official objections from the Khartoum government to anyone on the team, led by 1997 Nobel Peace Prize co-laureate Jody Williams.
In its statement on Wednesday, the team said it had decided “that it can no longer allow the continued uncertainty regarding visas from Sudan to impede the continuance of the mission” after talks and consultations in the Ethiopian capital.
The team was due to travel to Khartoum from Addis Ababa. But a Foreign Ministry source said the government objected to Guyanese Bertrand Ramcharan, the former deputy UN human rights commissioner, who was one of the six-member rights team.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Ali al-Sadig on Wednesday said talks to resolve the dispute had been unsuccessful.
“We are conducting some consultations with them and unfortunately these consultations reached nowhere,” al-Sadig said. “We hope that dialogue will continue.”
The ministry source, who declined to be named, said Khartoum objected to Ramcharan, who was acting high commissioner in 2003-04 at the height of the Darfur conflict, because he had referred to the conflict as genocide, a term Khartoum rejects.
Washington calls the rape, pillage and murder in Darfur genocide. Experts estimate 200,000 have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes in four years of conflict in Darfur.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is investigating suspected war crimes in the region.
The UN rights team said it would proceed with its work and “collect all relevant information from locations outside the country (Sudan)”.
The UN human rights council based in Geneva has come under harsh criticism for failing to address atrocities in Darfur.
U.N.-Sudanese relations have been tense in the past 18 months over Khartoum’s rejection of the deployment of UN peacekeepers to Darfur, despite a Security Council resolution authorizing the force.
Khartoum calls it an attempt at Western colonization and last year expelled the top UN official in Sudan, Jan Pronk, over comments he made about army defeats in Darfur.
(Reuters)