Sudan: top envoy misquoted on ICC, says UN mission
According to the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), these appear to be derived from a recent erroneous and misleading report on the Al-Jazeera.net website, which the mission has already requested be retracted.
Ashraf Qazi, the Secretary-General's Special Representative, has never predicted a date for any action by the ICC, an independent institution, UNMIS said in a statement.
In 2005, the Security Council referred the situation in the war-ravaged Sudanese region of Darfur to the Court.
To date, three cases have arisen from the situation. Last May, the ICC's pre-trial chamber issued arrest warrants for Ahmad Harun, former Sudanese Minister of State for the Interior and now the Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs, and Ali Kushayb, a Janjaweed leader.
The Court is also examining Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo's application filed in July for an arrest warrant against President Omar al-Bashir for alleged war crimes, including genocide, in Darfur.
In November, Mr. Moreno-Ocampo presented evidence against three rebel commanders for their role in deadly attack in December 2007 that killed 12 peacekeepers serving with the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) – a predecessor to the joint UN-AU mission known as UNAMID – and wounding eight others.
Some 300,000 people are estimated to have been killed across Darfur, an impoverished and arid region of western Sudan, as a result of direct combat, disease or malnutrition since 2003. Another 2.7 million people have been displaced because of fighting among rebels, Government forces and the allied Janjaweed militia.