Bar Sudan’s Bashir from EU-Africa summit, rights groups
October 19, 2007 (LISBON) — Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir should be barred from attending a December summit of European and African leaders, leading human rights groups said Friday.
Bashir’s presence at the Lisbon summit “could be interpreted as a legitimisation of atrocities committed by the Khartoum regime in Darfur,” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam International said from the Portuguese capital where European Union leaders were meeting.
The groups also called for foreign bank accounts held by Bashir and other Sudanese leaders to be frozen and sanctions applied against the government.
According to the UN at least 200,000 people have been killed and more than two million displaced in the conflict that has spawned what aid groups describe as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Friday’s appeal by the rights groups comes a day after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown renewed his warning to boycott the summit if another controversial leader — Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe — attends.
Portugal’s Foreign Minister Luis Amado, whose country currently has the EU’s rotating presidency, said last week that the guest list would be finalised by the end of October.
(AFP)
Kur
Bar Sudan’s Bashir from EU-Africa summit, rights groups
The world must come together to let Bashir know that there are consequences for humanright abuses in Sudan. Not only in Darfur but in all parts of the country…As history can tell, European leaders would not allow Adolf Hiler to come in their midst. Similarly, the man who has ordered the rape of women and children, castration of men, burning of villages ,killing of unknown number of people in Darfur, and who tends to sabotage the peace process in South Sudan should not be accorded the honour of addressing the leaders of the free world.