The UN Human Rights Council to send an Assessment Mission to Darfur
Press release 527/2006
13 December, 2006
The UN Human Rights Council today decided to send a high level mission to Darfur to assess the human rights situation in the region. The mission will consist of five highly qualified persons, to be appointed by the President of the Council. It will make an objective assessment of the facts, and issue concrete recommendations on how to improve the human rights situation in Darfur. The Mission will report its findings in the next Session of the Council in March 2007.
The initiative to hold a special session on Darfur of the Human Rights Council was put forward by Finland on 30 November and was backed in the following days by 65 countries drawn from all regional groups.
The EU welcomes the consensus reached on the operational outcome to the special session. The two-day session provided an opportunity for a comprehensive debate. Although some diverging views on the situation on the ground were heard, the 47 member states of the Council were in the end able to agree on a practical follow-up.
The decision also sends an important signal that the recently established Human Rights Council is fulfilling its mandate and is capable of action in an objective, non-selective and universal manner. The EU now stresses that the mission is set up without delay and get to work expeditiously.
The special session was opened on Tuesday with a message from the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urging the Council to send a team of independent and universally respected experts to investigate the latest escalation of abuses. In his written message to the Council, Jan Egeland, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator stressed that this session could be the final opportunity to reverse the trends that are pushing Darfur and the region towards disaster.
Since the outbreak of the conflict in Darfur, the total number of deaths is estimated by the UN to have exceeded 200.000. In addition, at least another two million have been forced to leave their homes because of fighting throughout Darfur. In recent weeks, the violence has further escalated and only days ago, the increasing level of violence and attacks against relief workers forced the UN to start evacuating their personnel from parts of Darfur.
Further information: Johanna Suurpää, Director, Unit for Human Rights Policy, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, tel. +358 40 724 0287; and Katri Silfverberg, Counsellor, Permanent Mission of Finland to the UN in Geneva, tel. +41 79 644 3708