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Elections in Sudan | Letter To The Times

12 April 2015

On April 9th, a group of British Politicians, including Baroness Cox, sent a letter to the Editor of the Times denouncing the upcoming elections, entitled “The genocidal regime of Omar Al-Bashir must be ostracised”. The full text of the letter is just below; you can also find it online here. You can also read our introductory briefing on elections in Sudan here

“Sir, We will neither recognise nor accept the conditions under which Sudan will hold presidential and parliamentary elections this weekend. Should this flawed poll proceed, it will yet again legitimise the corrupt and bloody rule of the incumbent president, Omar Al-Bashir. He has already held power for 25 years, during which he has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court. Elections cannot be considered “free and fair” in a state that bombs, kills, rapes, displaces or terrorises millions of its own citizens. Elections lack credibility when prominent opposition figures are arrested and detained, where crackdowns on the freedom of association have led to the deaths of hundreds of protesters and where media censorship is routine.

No internationally recognised electoral body will oversee this poll. We ask our government to not recognise these elections before the tragedy we see before us is played out — to the detriment of the suffering Sudanese population.

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead; the Baroness Cox, CEO, Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust; Lord Avebury; Baroness Goudie; Mark Durkan; Jeremy Lefroy, Conservative candidate for Stafford; Lord Alton of Liverpool; Lord Luce; Pauline Latham; Henry Bellingham; Andrew Smith, Labour candidate, Oxford East; Sir Roger Gale; Rabbi Maurice Michaels; Reverend Giles Fraser, St Mary’s Newington Waging Peace, London SE11″

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