Commemorating the 4th of March as a Day for Justice and Accountability in Sudan

The Sudan Liberation Movement – MM (SLM-MM) issued a statement in commemoration of the 8^thanniversary of the International Criminal Court’s decision to charge several Sudanese government officials and the ruling National Congress Party for committing grave violations of human rights, war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity in the Darfur region. On the top of this wanted for justice list is the sitting Sudanese President Omer Al-Bashir.

Sudan Democracy First Group (SDFG), decided to re-publish the SLM-MM’s statement and emphasise once again the accordance with SDFG’s strategic goal of siding with the victims and working to redress their grievances. On the 8^th anniversary of these charges on 4^th of March 2009, SDFG reaffirmed the importance of already existing political agreements by on the Sudanese political and civil agents of change to call on the Sudanese forces to work for:

• Upholding values of justice, by holding perpetrators of the serious violations of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, violations of the international humanitarian law and international law of human rights accountable by presenting them to fair trials in national and international courts, to stop impunity and bring perpetrators to justice.
• to address policies and institutions which enabled these gross violations of human rights, especially the crimes of genocide, not only by the application of criminal responsibility, proactive cooperation with the International Criminal Court and extradition of those wanted to the court, but also by facing the ethical, political, social, cultural, and moral responsibilities of these crimes.
• to combat the culture of racism and discrimination, and issuing legal frameworks that incriminate racism and racial abuses and punish the denial of genocide in Sudan.
• to emphasize and consolidate the principles of justice and accountability, including the concepts and mechanisms of transitional justice specifically taking into account the Sudanese context.
• To demarcate the crime of genocide as a central incident committed by the National Congress Party regime and demand for it to be included in educational curricula and courses, to be transmitted through the media, and to be raised in public discourse in order to emphasize the cultural, religious and ethnic multiplicity of the Sudanese identity, and to document such crimes by the different tools such as national museums.

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Text of the statement, below.