U.N. rights body to debate sending team to Darfur
Source: Reuters
GENEVA, Dec 1 (Reuters) - The top United Nations human rights body will debate sending an "urgent assessment mission" to Sudan's Darfur region in an emergency meeting later this month, according to a draft resolution circulated on Friday. The text offered by Finland on behalf of the European Union (EU) calls on the Human Rights Council to express grave concern over the human rights and humanitarian situation in Darfur, and demand an immediate end to "gross and systematic" violations. It also includes an appeal to "dispatch an urgent assessment mission to Darfur headed by the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Sudan". The session will begin around Dec. 12, a U.N. spokesman said. Draft texts are debated and often amended before being voted on by the 47-member state forum. The six-month-old Council has come under pressure from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and others to confront atrocities in Darfur, where some 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million forced from their homes since early 2003. Bloody conflict between mostly non-Arab rebels who accuse the government of neglect, and Khartoum-backed tribal militias, has escalated since a May peace deal that was signed by only one of three rebel factions at the negotiating table. The United States, whose observer delegation co-sponsored the request for a special session, has said the campaign of rape, murder and pillage that has consumed the western Sudanese region amounts to genocide. In a statement, U.S. ambassador Warren Tichenor called the special session "an important step" to ease suffering in the western corner of Sudan, across the border from Chad, where hundreds of thousands of people from Darfur live as refugees. The Geneva-based Council, created in May to replace the old Human Rights Commission which became paralysed by its members' reluctance to confront rights abusers, has focused most of its attention on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Darfur session will be its fourth emergency session, following two special meetings on the Palestinian territories and one on Lebanon.
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