The Limits of State Sovereignty: Darfur Crisis and the United Nations

Abstract

The genocide in Darfur, Sudan has left over 300,000 dead, thus bringing the death toll in the entire Sudanese conflicts from 1956 to almost 2 million people and the number of displaced persons to over 2 million. The exacerbation of the crisis is traceable to government’s complicity exemplified by its standing order to the United Nations to stay off and evacuate its monitors in what it considered an entirely Sudanese affair that could be resolved without external interference. However, considering the limits of state sovereignty in a modern international system, where membership of the UN, the existence of the Geneva Convention on the Laws of War, Humanitarian Law and other subsisting legal frameworks on war crimes erode absolute sovereignty, the Sudanese government cannot hide under the non-interference in the internal affairs of states clause to prevent the international community from intervention in Darfur. This probably explains the recent approval by the Government of Sudan to finally allow a joint UN-AU troops to restore security, bowing to intense international pressure to do so