EU Parliament calls for UN arms embargo on Sudan

STRASBOURG, Nov 17 (AFP) — The European Parliament called on the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday to slap an overall arms embargo and targetted sanctions on Sudan in a bid to help end its civil wars.

In a resolution adopted as the UN Security Council flew to Nairobi for a meeting focussing on Sudan’s main civil war, the EU assembly said the sanctions should be aimed at “the perpetrators of systematic attacks on human rights and other atrocities.”

The EU’s directly elected assembly also stressed that the sanctions should not be aimed at ordinary people.

They should, it said, ensure that such sanctions do not add to the suffering of the population of Sudan.”

The call from the assembly, which enjoys moral but not legal weight, came after European leaders on November 4 expressed “grave concern” about the deteriorating plight of Sudan’s Darfur region, and reiterated their readiness to help the African Union to expand a mission there.

At the instigation of the United States, the UN Security Council was to hold the meeting on Thursday and Friday, principally to put pressure on Khartoum and the SPLM/A to finalise a deal to end a war that has claimed 1.5 million lives and displaced more than four million people since 1983.

It is hoped that such a deal would also help to resolve a separate conflict in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, where tens of thousands of people have been killed and some 1.6 million displaced since February 2003, when two rebel groups rose up against Khartoum.

The government responded with major aerial and ground assaults and by coopting militia forces widely accused of commiting serious war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In 1994 the present day European Union imposed an arms embargo on Sudan.