ICC Prosecutor: ‘Crimes are being committed in Darfur as we speak’ – calls on Sudan govt for ‘concrete action’ on arrest warrants for Al Bashir, Haroun, Hussein

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has called on the government of Sudan for concrete action to be taken in relation to the warrants issued by the ICC in relation to former President Omar Al Bashir, Ahmed Haroun, and Abdelrahim Hussein. In his briefing to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on the Situation in Darfur in New York on Monday, Kahn said that the ICC believe it knows where Haroun is. “We have communicated that to Sudan. And we need now to find a way to deliver on the terms of the Security Council Resolution [1593 (2005)] and meet the expectations, not of abstract legal principles, but on the victims, on the representatives of the Darfuri community here in this Court and those thousands watching, that are looking for promises made to be promises kept, for the law to apply equally, and for their hell to stop…”

Khan told the UNSC: “The last six months have reflected a further descent, indeed a tailspin, into deeper suffering, deeper misery for the people of Darfur. Famine is present in Darfur. Conflict is increasing. Children are targeted. Girls and women are subject to rape. And the whole landscape is one of destruction, and, we say, criminality. This descent is accelerating, if anything. It’s accelerating as we speak. Today and yesterday in El Fasher, we see developments in which serious allegations emerge of more innocent civilians being targeted, vital civilian objects like hospitals being attacked. And there seems to be no respite for the Darfuri people.

“It’s the clear view of my Office, as reflected in the report that is before the Council that, as we speak, international crimes are undoubtedly being committed in Darfur. They’re being committed as we speak. And daily, unfortunately, we see crimes being used as a weapon of war for so many that the law is meant to protect from these types of excesses. And this is not, I want to make clear, a general assessment, it is not an assessment gleaned from unverified reports. It’s a hard-edged analysis that my Office has reached based upon evidence and information collected and reviewed.”

Khan says that “the ICC is particularly concerned about the stream of allegations of the targeting of women and girls, the allegations of gender crimes identified through our investigations. And these crimes are a priority of my Office, and in the last six months we have tried to meet the situation on the ground by improving efficiency and trying to be responsive. We’ve done that by being in Chad, and being in the other countries bordering Sudan, where we’ve collected evidence from displaced communities about what they’ve suffered, what they’ve witnessed, what they’ve seen. We’ve conducted witness interviews. We’ve increased the scale and quantum of evidence we collected from digital and video sources, harnessing technological tools that my Office has put in place, so that we have a better visibility on the linkage between perpetrators, alleged perpetrators, their structures and crime patterns…”

Read the complete report here