"Killing of civilians remains widespread, including in large-scale attacks. Rape and sexual violence are widespread and systematic. Torture continues." Darfur. Again. A United Nations human rights team report on Monday demanded immediate UN action to protect civilians from a campaign in which it directly implicates Sudan's government.
And the panel, headed by American campaigner against land mines and Nobel peace laureate, Jody Williams, dispensed with the usual diplomatic niceties of UN reports to accuse world powers of letting Sudan obstruct efforts to quell the ethnic fighting that has killed 200,000 people and displaced 2.5 million in four years.
Although the UN Human Rights Council had commissioned it at an emergency session in December, the report is expected to face considerable opposition from Sudan itself, other African countries, and both China and Russia when it comes up for adoption on Friday in Geneva. But the council's willingness to pass the report will be seen widely as an important test of the credibility of the new body which was established in June to replace the largely discredited Human Rights Commission, populated as it was by human rights abusers. The record of the new 47-member council is not good - to date it has only criticised the record of one country, Israel.
If the UN's security council does not impose targeted sanctions against Sudan in the next few week US officials have suggested that Washington will go ahead unilaterally, while Denmark and Britain are trying to persuade the EU to follow suit. Ireland should support such a call.
In September 2005 the assembled heads of state at a UN summit adopted a series of global commitments, among them the novel concept of a collective "Responsibility to Protect" the world's citizens - even against their own governments. State sovereignty, they agreed, could not be used to justify atrocities or to bar collective international action to protect those citizens. The concept requires that diplomatic and other peaceful means are tried first, but where "national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity", the UN Security Council may use Chapter VII of its charter to propose the use of military force.
Beyond strongly reinforcing the woefully inadequate African Union peacekeeping force on the ground, the UN could and should seek to impose an aerial no-fly zone over Darfur. But, despite many resolutions, the UN remains unable to act in the face of a genocide potentially on the scale of Rwanda and many times that in Srebrenica, held hostage by the veto powers of two states whose record on human rights is deeply questionable. In the circumstances, democratic nations, faced with a moral imperative to "protect", must regrettably be prepared to consider supporting military action outside the UN framework as they work on the other hand to reform its inadequate decision-making structures.