Le Soudan goes back to the International Court of Justice (CPI) trois anciens direants parmi lesquels l’autocrate dechu Omar el-Béchir, recherchés notamment pour «genocide» et crimes contre l’humanité lors du conflit au Darfour, to indicate mercredi the minister Foreign Affairs.
“The Council of Ministers has decided to hand over the wanted persons to the International Criminal Court,” Minister Mariam al-Mahdi said, according to the official Suna news agency, during a meeting with the court’s new attorney general based in The Hague. . , Karim Khan, visiting Khartoum for a week.
Beginning in 2003, the conflict in Darfur, a region in the west of the country, opposed the predominantly Arab regime of Omar al-Bashir and rebels from ethnic minorities who considered themselves marginalized. It left some 300,000 dead and almost 2.5 million displaced, mainly during the first years of violence, according to the United Nations.
Omar al-Bashir was ousted in April 2019, after months of unprecedented popular movement. In February 2020, the transitional power established after his fall had verbally pledged to promote Omar al-Bashir’s appearance before the ICC, which issued arrest warrants against him and other figures of the former regime, for “crimes against them. humanity “and” genocide “in Darfur.
The other two regime officials to be handed over to the ICC are former South Kordofan state governor Ahmed Haroun and former defense minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, wanted for the same reasons. Arrested after the fall of Bashir, they are currently detained in Sudan.
A historic peace agreement signed in October 2020 between the transitional government and various rebel groups insisted on the need for “full and unlimited cooperation” with the ICC.
Sudanese cabinet ministers voted last week to ratify the Rome Statute of the ICC.
The Sudanese minister stressed on Wednesday “the importance” of her country’s cooperation with the ICC “to obtain justice for the victims of the Darfur war.”
Already convicted of corruption in December 2019, the former president is currently being held in Kober prison in Khartoum.
He is also on trial by the Sudanese justice for his role in the coup that brought him to power in 1989, but his trial has been repeatedly postponed since July 2020, with lawyers for the defendants presenting procedural arguments.