Sudan’s Leader May Be Accused of Genocide

The president of Sudan, who is already facing an international arrest warrant, came under new legal scrutiny on Wednesday when appeals judges at The Hague reopened the possibility that he may be charged with genocide.

The Sudanese leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, became the first sitting president to face an arrest order by the International Criminal Court in March, when pre-trial judges said he should be tried for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Sudan’s region of Darfur. But the judges rejected the prosecutor’s request to charge Mr. Bashirwith genocide, arguing that the evidence presented was insufficient.The court’s appeals chamber, in a short session on Wednesday, directed the judges to reconsider the prosecution evidence and to decide anew whether Mr. Bashir’s actions could amount to genocide. They found that the judges had used far higher standards of proof than were needed for an arrest warrant, and that the dismissal of the prosecutor’s genocide charges therefore amounted to an “error or law.”

Lawyers following the proceedings said that to sign an arrest order at this court, judges must find that there are “grounds for charges” but that in this case the judges had sought a level of proof needed to find someone guilty or innocent.

The re-opening of the genocide question may not bring Sudan’s president, who has thus far defied the court, any closer to trial in The Hague. But genocide charges carry a heavy weight that could affect his international dealings and isolate him.

To demonstrate that he has sympathy in the world, he has pointedly traveled outside Sudan, and was received in countries including Egypt, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but other governments have asked him to stay away, saying that as members of the court they would be obliged to arrest him or wanted to avoid the issue.

Last fall, Mr. Bashir did not make his customary visit to the United Nations in New York and he has been disinvited to planned international get-togethers in South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria and Turkey. French president Nicolas Sarkozy said he would not attend a summit in Egypt this month to avoid any encounter with the Sudanese president.

Officials in Sudan on Wednesday dismissed the court’s decision as irrelevant to Mr. Bashir’s movements and said it would not affect his running for president in the elections this spring. The news came as Mr. Bashir was in Qatar, attending peace talks between his government and several rebel groups.

Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo has said the peace talks are largely a result of the continuing pressure on the president. When he launched his case against Mr.Bashir, there were no peace talks, he said.

The question of whether genocide was committed in Darfur as the Sudanese government used its forces against rebel movements in the past five years, has been divisive, and was so among the judges. The Bush administration, several other governments and human rights activists have called the attacks by the Sudanese forces and militia against civilians genocide, directed mainly at three African tribes. The United Nations has stopped short of calling the attacks genocide.

The judges at the new international court, which has 110 member countries and opened in 2002, have evidently wrestled with their decisions involving a sitting head of state. They took seven months to respond to the prosecutor’s request for an arrest warrant. The appeals chamber, which on Wednesday ordered that the genocide question be re-opened, has had eight months to deliberate.

The prosecutor said that he would provide new evidence to support his genocide charges, and would include the president’s expulsion of international aid agencies last year which provided crucial food, drinking water and medical supplies to war victims and refugees in the Darfur region.

The United Nations estimates that in the past five years, the conflicts in Sudan has left 300,000 people dead and more than 2.7 million displaced as they fled atrocities or their villages were destroyed.