Sudan rejects pressure over Darfur at UN rights commission meeting

GENEVA, March 14 (AFP) — Sudan on Monday rejected international pressure over its strife-torn Darfur region at a meeting of the UN Commission on human rights, warning any move to criticise it at its annual session here could backfire.

“Unmeasured, uneven and unbalanced pressure and signals have exacerbated the already volatile situation in Darfur,” Sudan’s Justice Minister Ali Yassine said in a speech to the 53-strong committee which began its 61st annual session here on Monday.

“Any undue pressure on the government of national unity will retard its ability to implement the comprehensive peace agreement,” he said.

“This in turn will impede the benefits of peace from reaching the Sudanese people. Let us give peace in the Sudan a positive environment in which to take root”.

Earlier as the annual session of the UN body opened, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights urged world leaders and organisations to be less picky about whose rights they supported, particularly in Darfur.

“Our approach to human rights diplomacy remains unsatisfactory. It is sporadic and selective,” Louise Arbour said.

In western Sudan, where a two-year insurgency by rebel groups fighting on behalf of the local black African population has been met with a brutal crackdown by a Khartoum-backed Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, Arbour said “mass violations of human rights being perpetrated in Darfur” had gone largely unchallenged.

On Monday the UN’s humanitarian chief Jan Egeland told AFP more than 180,000 people have been killed in the conflict in the past 18 months — an average of 10,000 people a month.

Several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) claim many of the countries among the 53 represented on the commission, which has embarked on six weeks of hearings, have poor human rights records themselves.

Last year, the commission criticised and pressured only small countries, while widely reported cases of rights violations on a big scale in Iraq, Chechnya and Darfur, where Washington last year used the word “genocide” for the raids by the Janjaweed, went unremarked by the UN body.