Sudan criticises UN rights mission as ‘biased’
March 11, 2007 (CAIRO) — Sudan’s justice minister blasted the UN rights mission to his country as “biased” on Sunday as he headed to Geneva for a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council.
The council will open a three-week session on Monday with member states and top officials bristling over Sudan’s decision to rebuff a mission to assess the situation in strife-torn Darfur.
At the meeting in Geneva, Justice Minister Mohammed Ali al-Mardhi, is expected to seek to justify his country’s decision not to grant the visas for the UN mission in February.
Mardhi, in Cairo en route to Geneva, was quoted by Egypt’s official MENA news agency as saying that the mission was “biased” and made up of individuals prejudiced against Sudan.
The mission was set up by a rare consensus of the Council’s 47 members following hard bargaining between Western, African and Islamic nations during a special session in December on human rights violations in Darfur.
Mardhi, however, maintained that the mission was formed without sufficient consultation of regional blocs in the council.
Mardhi also said Sudan would not be intimidated by threats of sanctions to allow foreign troops or let its citizens be tried by international courts.
“The sanctions do not frighten us and and will not force us to retreat from our principles of rejecting foreign forces from Darfur and not agreeing to the trying of any Sudanese outside Sudan,” he said.
The International Criminal Court has implicated two Sudanese officials for involvement in the humanitarian crisis in the western region of Darfur that has claimed at least 200,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million others.
(AFP)