Avichayil blog

U.N. rights envoy denounces repression in Sudan

GENEVA (Reuters) – Sudan has arrested political opposition leaders, journalists and students ahead of a critical referendum early next year on whether the south should secede, a U.N. rights investigator said on Friday.

Many detainees have alleged they were tortured or denied the right to challenge their custody in court, said Mohamed Chande Othman, an independent expert on human rights in Sudan.

Othman -- whose U.N. mandate Sudan called for ending on Friday -- also urged Khartoum to lift restrictions on the press in the run-up to the referendum set for January 9, 2011.

"These developments represent a serious setback and are of particular concern as the country prepares for the referendum," Othman said in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

"It is essential that authorities uphold human rights principles as a way of ensuring a peaceful and credible referendum," he said.

Othman, a justice on Tanzania's court of appeals, said much of the information in his latest report covering May to August came from the joint U.N.-African Union (UNAMID) peacekeeping force and the U.N. mission in Sudan.

The south is expected to vote to secede from the Islamic north against which it has fought an off-on civil war since 1955 over ethnicity, ideology and oil.

Southerners were promised a vote on whether to secede in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement which ended Africa's longest civil war. The conflict claimed 2 million lives, mostly through hunger and disease, and destabilized much of east Africa.

OIL RESERVES

Relations between both sides have remained troubled and southern leaders have accused Khartoum of trying to disrupt the vote to keep control of the south's oil reserves.

Military operations have continued in Darfur but very few aerial bombardments and attacks on civilians in the troubled western region were documented compared to previous periods, according to the U.N. investigator.

Othman has called for an inquiry into a militia attack on civilians in North Darfur on Sept 2. Eyewitnesses told Reuters on Friday that Darfuri men were shot dead at point blank range during the raid on a busy market in which at least 39 people were killed and almost 50 injured.

The International Criminal Court in the Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide and war crimes in Darfur, charges he denies.

Sudan's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, John Ukec, said in a speech that Othman's report was "relatively balanced." But it was imperative for the Council to eliminate his position at its current session which ends on October 1, he said.

The United States and European Union took the floor to say that major human rights problems persisted in Sudan and to call for ongoing scrutiny of the vast country. There is still wide impunity for atrocities in Darfur, said Daniel Baer, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

But Sudan's allies including Syria, speaking for the Arab group of countries, and Pakistan, on behalf of Islamic states, said there was no need for a U.N. expert to monitor Sudan.