The African Union and South Sudan are failing in their joint responsibility to set up a court to prosecute atrocities in the country and are not cooperating with a United Nations inquiry, a U.N. investigator said on Tuesday.
“There is no reason to think that a robust hybrid court will be set up any time soon by the African Union, if ever. Indeed some senior officials have told us that it will never happen,” Kenneth Scott, a member of the U.N. commission on human rights in South Sudan, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“We’ve requested the draft documents that we understand exist – a draft statute, a draft memorandum of understanding – but they have declined to provide it to the commission.”
Since 2013 South Sudan has been mired in civil war, which the pope called “fratricidal”. President Salva Kiir, whose government has declared famine promising aid agencies safe access to hunger-stricken civilians.
South Sudan has been hit by the same east African drought that has pushed Somalia back to the brink of famine, six years after 260,000 people starved to death in 2011.
Source: Reuters
