President of Sudan faces arrest over genocide in Darfur

Published on Friday 11 July 2008 22:08

THE six-year-old International Criminal Court in The Hague, which has yet to complete a single trial or secure a conviction, is preparing to issue an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accusing him of genocide against the people of Darfur.

In a move widely seen as an effort to rescue the court's diminishing reputation, as well as promote international justice, United Nations officials said the ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, would also charge the head of state of Sudan, Africa's largest nation, with crimes against humanity.

The charges, which on Monday will be accompanied by the issuing of an international arrest warrant, relate to the Sudan government's five-year violent campaign against the people of Darfur, an arid region in the west of the country the size of France.

The charges mean that Mr Bashir faces arrest if he sets foot outside Sudan.

Some 400,000 Darfuris in a population of 6.5 million have died in the conflict and three million have become refugees.

The action against Mr Bashir will be the first time that the ICC, which began work in July 2002, has charged a sitting head of state with crimes against humanity, with implications for other heads of state with questionable human rights records, such as Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

The ICC was established as the world's first permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Other international tribunals, such as those for Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone and at Nuremburg at the end of the Second World War, were one-off international law courts.

A fragile and ill-equipped 10,000-strong African Union force is trying to protect the Darfuris, black African Muslims, against Khartoum's Arab military forces and militias known as janjaweed.

The decision to charge Mr Bashir has raised fears among some United Nations officials that the African peacekeepers, who operate with the help of a few hundred specialist UN staff, will now be at even greater risk.