I’m still digesting my pages and pages of notes, and ordering my thoughts, so take this as a non-exhaustive list: 1. Collapse of GBV services following the expulsion of the humanitarians If there was one issue I could get a spot on CNN to talk about, it would be this. I had an inkling of […]
Time to take a position
August 1, 2009 by 5 Comments
Wow – is really the only thing I can come up with after reading this. Below is the relevant section of the transcript from yesterday’s U.S. State Department press briefing by Phillip Crowley. If you have the bandwidth (I don’t) you can watch the video of it. And if anyone knows who this incredibly persistent […]
Fighting to keep genocide out of the Bashir arrest warrant
July 28, 2009 by 3 Comments
High profile international lawyers Sir Geoffrey Nice QC and Rodney Dixon have once again applied on behalf of the groups, the Sudan Workers Trade Unions Federation (SWTUF) and the Sudan International Defence Group (SIDG), to submit an amicus brief to the ICC in the Bashir case. Their first attempt to do this earlier in the […]
UNDPKO briefing: “We are in many ways no closer to a solution . . .”
July 27, 2009 by 1 Comment
On Friday morning, the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Alain Le Roy, briefed the UN Security Council in New York during their 6170th meeting. His briefing covered the progress of UNAMID deployment (five battalion and five infantry companies arriving in the coming months; nine of the proposed eleven formed police units to be deployed by the […]
AU Commission reacts to civil society support for ICC Bashir case
July 17, 2009 by 1 Comment
Following a flurry of media reports indicating that some South African civil society organizations want President Zuma to distance himself from last week’s AU decision to oppose the arrest warrant for President al-Bashir, as well as a poll released yesterday indicating that the general public in some countries is not as opposed to the Bashir […]
Aid expulsions: Are we missing the real story?
July 15, 2009 by 5 Comments
Fellow bloggers over at Change.org have been running a couple of posts trying to get at the thorny question of just what the impact of the NGO expulsions has been on the provision of aid in Darfur. It’s been a question of intrigue ever since US Special Envoy, Scott Gration, came out with a strange […]
Rob Crilly: The Analysis is the Problem
July 14, 2009 by 4 Comments
Rob Crilly is a British journalist I met in Nairobi. He has spent the past five years covering Darfur, and has his first book coming out later this year, entitled Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War. He and I disagree on several things (the value of the ICC for instance) and he, like many, has […]
AU corrects Reuters
July 11, 2009 by Leave a Comment
The continuing saga . . . As it happened I was at the AU this afternoon to listen to Obama’s speech in Ghana. It was delayed because of the rain, and so a friend who works at the AU took me to the Commission’s Situation Room. It’s really just an office with a couple of […]
Seems Reuters got it wrong
July 11, 2009 by Leave a Comment
* 10.30am UPDATE This just through from someone who was actually at the press conference Reuters was reporting on: During that briefing, Pres. Mbeki was asked about the warrants. He said that the ICC warrants are part of the reality with which the Panel has to work but that the Panel has not yet formed […]
Alex Meixner: Ongoing recalibration
Following a series of posts by Tim Nonn and Rob Crilly, today’s contribution comes from Alex Meixner – Senior Director for Policy and Government Relations at Save Darfur. In this quite lengthy post, Meixner deals with the question of how U.S.-based advocates can maintain political strength, as well as the policy question of what that […]