Los Estados miembros de la Asamblea General de la ONU deben exigir que el presidente de Sudán, Omar Hassan Ahmad al Bashir, sea entregado a la Corte Penal Internacional (CPI) por cargos de genocidio, crímenes contra la humanidad y crímenes de guerra, ha dicho Amnistía Internacional.

The Sudanese presidential assistant Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamid brushed aside the fierce skepticism surrounding the government’s recently signed contract with a Russian mining company but acknowledged that the figures announced on gold reserves could well be exaggerated.



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Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamid

The contract was signed in late July with a company named as ‘Siberian’ for mining concessions in the Red Sea and River Nile states. President Omer Hassan al-Bashir reportedly attended the signing ceremony which was not made public.



Sudan’s minerals minister Ahmed Sadiq al-Karuri announced at the time that the company discovered 46,000 tonnes of gold reserves in these two sites with a combined market value of $1.70 trillion.



On top of the mammoth figure, skepticism grew deeper after a Sudanese consultant working for the ministry out of Moscow named Mohamed Ahmed Saboon tendered his resignation because of the contract with the company which he described as “unknown”.



Saboon also described the $1.70 trillion figure as “science fiction”.



Hamid, who is also the ruling party vice chairman, asserted in a television interview on Tuesday night that the Russian company is reputable and well known adding that its officials were part of a ministerial delegation that flew from Moscow to Khartoum recently.



However he admitted that the gold reserves figures may have been inflated.



"The figures put forward by the company about gold reserves may be 100% or 50% accurate," Hamid said.



The Sudanese official recalled that there were also skeptics when Sudan announced the discovery of oil in the late 90’s.



The chairman of Siberian mining company Vladimir Jakov said in an interview with al-Sudani newspaper on Monday that he personally has a 99% stake in the company along with a Sudanese partner whom he declined to name.



Jakov pointed out that he suffered “irreparable” damage from the skeptical talk about the company in terms of his bank dealings and reputation in Russia and abroad.



He said that there is confusion and mix-up between the parent company which he named as Golden Stone Vasilievsky Rudnik Mine Siberian For Mining Company LTD that is based in Russia.



He said that Siberian is the Sudanese subsidiary of the parent company and officially registered in Sudan adding that they spent about $10 million in geological research.



The pro-government Sudan Vision newspaper said that the group was owned by the Russian government till it was sold to the private sector in 1993 after it tumbled due to the collapse of the Soviet Union.



It further said that it was bought by the current investors and Jakov who led the company to become strong again and he was awarded the order of achievement by president Putin in 2004 himself for his role in lifting the company again.

Quoated directly from nytimes.com



The case against Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, starkly illustrates the court’s profound limitations, and the reason it is such a lightning rod.



The court can indict even sitting heads of state, as it did with Mr. Bashir. But it has no power to handcuff them and put them in the dock. Instead, the court relies on other heads of state and governments to act as its sheriffs around the world, and for the last six years, many of them have let Mr. Bashir flout the court’s arrest warrant.

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Omar al-Bashir, Leaving South Africa, Eludes Arrest Again JUNE 15, 2015



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Monday was a case in point. South Africa let Mr. Bashir fly home despite an order from South Africa’s High Court instructing the nation’s authorities to prevent him from leaving the country.



“South Africa was one of the strongest supporters of the court and a leading founding member,” said Fatou Bensouda, the international court’s chief prosecutor, said by telephone from Norway. “I’m not in a position to know why that dynamic changed.”



Given its inability to arrest suspects on its own, said Alex Whiting, a former attorney with the I.C.C. prosecutor’s office and now a law professor at Harvard, the International Criminal Court “will only be as relevant as the international community allows it to be.”



South Africa was only the most recent country to let Mr. Bashir visit and leave without arrest. It was a reminder, Mr. Whiting argued, of how hard the court must work to overcome the perception that it is targeting only Africans — and a reminder of how justice cannot be meted out unless the world powers invest in it.

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President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan defied a court order to remain in South Africa until it ruled on an application for his arrest on genocide charges from the International Criminal Court. By Reuters on Publish Date June 15, 2015. Photo by Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters. Watch in Times Video »



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“Bashir will ultimately be arrested,” he said, “only if the Security Council and countries like the U.S. and other important actors undertake a sustained effort to prioritize his arrest and make it a central part of their diplomatic efforts.”



But while the United States can pressure other nations to act, it faces a major credibility problem of its own. Unlike dozens of African nations, some of the world’s most powerful countries, including the United States, Russia and China, have not even joined the International Criminal Court, officially refusing to submit to its authority.



In 2011, Mr. Bashir visited China, where he was greeted by an honor guard and he met with China’s president at the time, Hu Jintao. Mr. Bashir called him “a friend and brother.”



Mark Ellis, president of the International Bar Association, said the latest Bashir drama further weakened the authority of the court, through no fault of its own.



It was set up in such a way that the world’s most powerful countries were able to keep themselves — and often their allies — out of its reach. That, he said, has allowed African leaders to assert that they have been unfairly and disproportionately targeted by the court.



“The International Criminal Court is weakened because major political powers have not embraced the court,” Mr. Ellis said.



International justice, he added, cannot mean “a system where states are able to say, ‘I’m going to withdraw from any accountability because I’m not going to engage in this process.’ ”



The court has issued 30 arrest warrants but won only two convictions. Many, like Mr. Bashir, have eluded arrest.



The United Nations Security Council referred the crisis in Darfur, Sudan, to the international court in 2005, leading the prosecutor to indict Mr. Bashir on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

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In the years since, the Security Council has done little to help the court get hold of him, even after he traveled to countries like Kenya, Chad and Nigeria, evading arrest.



Chad and Nigeria, both American allies, were elected as temporary members of the Council. Mr. Bashir’s powerful allies, China and Russia, are permanent, veto-wielding members of the Council.

Independent journalism.

More essential than ever.



The court has secured the arrests of lesser-known figures, most recently a man it had all but given up on: Dominic Ongwen, a Ugandan rebel commander who is charged with a long list of war crimes.



It is also prosecuting a former head of state from Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, and the deputy president of Kenya, William Ruto.



Other international tribunals, separate from the international court, have convicted senior leaders implicated in war crimes in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia.



Still, the court has become a major point of international contention, largely because world powers have used it selectively to advance their own interests.



Last year, France sought to persuade the Security Council to refer the situation in Syria to the court — a bid that was backed by the United States but vetoed, as expected, by Russia, an ally of the Syrian government.



The Palestinians have used the court to advance their cause. They moved to join the court in December as part of their effort to pursue statehood in the international arena after decades of failed negotiations with Israel. France, usually an enthusiastic supporter of the court, publicly said nothing in support of the Palestinian decision, while the United States was unequivocally critical.



The court’s reputation for neutrality came under attack after it indicted Mr. Bashir, as well as Uhuru Kenyatta, then deputy prime minister of Kenya, in connection with the violence that swept his country after the 2007 elections.

The Case Against Omar al-Bashir



In 2009, Mr. Bashir and three other senior Sudanese officials were indicted on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

The following year he was also charged with three counts of genocide.

The Arab-dominated Sudanese government is accused of trying to exterminate the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups.

The court said Mr. Bashir should stand trial over the “essential role” he is accused of playing in the murder, rape, torture and displacement of large numbers of civilians.

After driving civilians off their land and killing many of them, militias would rape and impregnate women who took refuge in camps, prosecutors said.

The 2009 warrant for Mr. Bashir was the first in which the court, established in 2002, sought the arrest of a sitting head of state.



The court was accused of bias against Africa, a charge that the court’s chief prosecutor, Ms. Bensouda, a Gambian, has forcefully denied. Still, the African Union pledged not to cooperate with the court on cases against sitting heads of state.



“I thought their obligations were made clear to them,” Ms. Bensouda said. “The African Union is a political body making political decisions. And legal obligations cannot be trumped by political expediency.”



In December, Ms. Bensouda announced she would drop the charges against Mr. Kenyatta, now Kenya’s president, citing his government’s lack of cooperation. That month, she also said she would “hibernate” the genocide case against Mr. Bashir, blaming the Security Council for not helping her secure his arrest.



The court has been looking beyond Africa in recent years. Ms. Bensouda has opened a preliminary examination into the role of British soldiers in Iraq. She has said she is looking into allegations of torture by American soldiers in Afghanistan, though she is far from opening an official investigation.



The Palestinian issue is by far the trickiest. The prosecutor must decide whether to investigate allegations of war crimes committed by Palestinians or Israelis during the 2014 Gaza war, the expansion of Israeli settlements or both issues.



Israel seems to be taking the possibility of an investigation by the court seriously, said Diane Orentlicher, a professor of international law at American University. The Israeli authorities have issued a barrage of legal opinions to defend their conduct during the 50-day war in Gaza last summer, even before the prosecutor has announced an official investigation.



As for South Africa, its government ended up flouting its own courts as well as the International Criminal Court, she said.



“And while the I.C.C. once again faces a state party’s refusal to arrest a suspect to be sure, this episode also reminds us that the court has an enduring impact on Bashir’s ability to function as a member of the global community,” she said in an email. “After all, he did not leave South Africa on his preferred terms.”



Even so, some analysts said South Africa’s decision to let Mr. Bashir leave could empower other nations — like Israel, which has not endorsed the court — to be uncooperative.



“Having a prominent state party and proponent of the court like South Africa, which is under a duty to comply, refuse to do so would only strengthen Israel’s position,” said Eugene Kontorovich, a law professor at Northwestern University.

Correction: June 15, 2015



An earlier version of this article misstated the month that the Palestinians joined the International Criminal Court. It was April, not December; they moved to join it in December. The earlier version also misstated the position of Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya at the time of his indictment. He was the deputy prime minister, not the head of state.

they need guards for that money

https://www.myfonts.com

osama

MYABE

As it's already the 26th in Sudan, I'm guessing either fake news or the contract fell through/was delayed or they used a different name in the end.

WAC isn't listed as any of the 12 vessels in port on

https://www.fleetmon.com/ports/port-sudan_sdpzu_1266/#tab-vessels-in-port

Nor does WAC seem to be in the 10 scheduled arrivals of the next 2 days

https://www.fleetmon.com/ports/port-sudan_sdpzu_1266/#tab-scheduled-arrivals

(the only one starting with a W is a Container ship and has more characters than 3 in its name)

Nor is WAC in the 1959 entries of port call history in the last week:

https://www.fleetmon.com/ports/port-sudan_sdpzu_1266/#tab-port-call-history



I also filtered for just sailing vessels or yachts in the last week of Port Sudan port call history and found 7 entries not starting with a W, with flags from Germany, Mongolia, Austria, UK, & St. Vincent & the Grenadines.



Finally, WAC doesn't even appear in the global vessel database there, of 703,117 in all:

https://www.fleetmon.com/vessels/