UN: Sudan yesterday set itself on a collision course with the United Nations, refusing to allow war crimes officials to enter the country to investigate atrocities in Darfur eight months after an international investigation was officially opened.
Justice minister Mohammed al-Mardi said investigators for the International Criminal Court, charged by the UN with investigating ethnic cleansing that has killed 30,000 and displaced more than a million refugees, will not be given access.
"The ICC officials have no jurisdiction inside the Sudan or with regards to Sudanese citizens," he said in Khartoum. "They cannot investigate anything on Darfur," he told Reuters.
His announcement came the day after a leading human rights group, Human Rights Watch, named Sudanese president Omar El Bashir as a key suspect in those massacres.
The stage is now set for a battle of wills between the UN, which already has war crimes courts operating for former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, and Sudan, which hopes to win support from the African Union, whose summit it hosts next month in Khartoum.
Sudan says it has its own war crimes trials and does not need a UN-backed investigation. Human rights officials worry that Sudan's government will try only lower-level officials and soldiers.