Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir is the President of Sudan PHOTO I Courtesy
Sudan’s president Omar Al-Bashir would rather remain a fugitive other than face justice for committed the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.
“We challenge the ICC and we defy it. These warrants are politically motivated accusations,” he claimed in an Interview last year.
Bashir, a wanted war criminal, attended India Africa Forum summit held in India, alleged that the arrest warrants against him are politically motivated.
“These warrants are politically motivated accusations. In Sudan we have been targeted by western countries because we have rejected their hegemony on Sudan, and turned their companies away, that were only interested in oil. Not only in Sudan, but we reject their policies in the Middle East , in Iraq, Afghanistan, in Syria. In Sudan we managed to expel all western companies who were involved in the extraction of oil, and replaced them with Chinese companies and Indian companies. This is why the west is targeting us through the ICC. The allegations are baseless, and India rejects them too as part of the colonial legacy of the past, it is a kind of “legal colonialism” they are practicing. Colonial legacy?” Read more of the Interview here.
The UN Security Council referred the situation in Darfur to the Prosecutor of the ICC in Resolution 1593 (2005) on 31 March 2005. The resolution requires Sudan and all other parties to the conflict in Darfur to cooperate with the Court. It also invites the Court and the African Union to discuss practical arrangements that will facilitate the work of the Prosecutor and of the Court, including the possibility of conducting proceedings in the region.
Fatou Bensouda, the ICC prosecutor suspended her investigations into war crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region because of a lack of action by the UN in 2014.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to appear before you and purport to be updating you when all I am doing is repeating the same things I have said over and over again,” Bensouda told the Security Council.
“Given this council’s lack of foresight on what should happen in Darfur, I am left with no choice but to hibernate investigative activities in Darfur as I shift resources to other urgent cases.”
