ICC Chief Prosecutor Says UN Should Do More to Arrest Al-Bashir
July 16, 2010
Bloomberg Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-16/icc-chief-prosecutor-says-un-should-do-more-to-arrest-al-bashir.html
July 16 (Bloomberg) -- The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor said United Nations Security Council members should step up efforts to bring Sudan President Umar al-Bashir to trial as they are bound by a UN accord to punish genocide.
"They have to do more effort to stop the genocide, the world is failing miserably to stop the genocide in Darfur," Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo told reporters today at the court in The Hague.
The court on July 12 issued a second arrest warrant against al-Bashir for responsibility of genocide in Sudan's western region of Darfur. The court last year issued a warrant against Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
"Most of the members of the Security Council are a member of the Genocide Convention, so they have individually additional obligations" to bring al-Bashir to trial, Moreno-Ocampo said. Sudan, which is not cooperating with the court, is a party to the Genocide Convention.
Security Council members including China, Russia and the U.S. are signatories to the 1948 convention, obliging them to prevent and punish the crime. The three countries haven't signed the 1998 Rome Statue, which established the ICC and its jurisdiction to prosecute genocide and war crimes.
Al-Bashir has ruled Sudan since coming to power in a military coup in 1989 and won election in April in the country's first multiparty vote in 24 years. As many as 300,000 people have died, mainly through illness and starvation, and more than 2.7 million have been displaced in Darfur since February 2003, according to the UN. Sudan says the death toll is about 10,000.
Separately, Moreno-Ocampo said today that he appealed the criminal court's decision to release Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese rebel leader accused of the war crime of using child soldiers.
--Editor: Jeffrey Donovan