Journal of International Criminal Justice Advance Access originally published online on July 4, 2005
Journal of International Criminal Justice 2005 3(3):600-607; doi:10.1093/jicj/mqi053
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The Darfur Commission as a Model for Future Responses to Crisis Situations
* Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, New York University Law School; alstonp{at}juris.law.nyu.edu.
The various special procedures so far set up by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to investigate serious violations of human rights are very different from what can be achieved by a commission of inquiry. There is almost no comparison in terms of the scale of resources, the expertise mobilized, the amount of detail contained in the Commission's Report, the precision and weight of the legal analysis, and the consequent power of the final product to galvanize both public opinion and inter-governmental action. The Darfur Commission may also serve to expand the bridge being built between the Commission of Human Rights and the Security Council (SC). The practice of appointing commissions of inquiry has immense potential in that it can provide the type of specialist input necessary if the human rights machinery and the SC are to form part of a continuum. Commissions of inquiry reports may contribute to promoting transparency and accountability in the work of the SC, since the Council, when determining whether or not to take action in a human rights situation, has to respond to a carefully documented and a well argued analytical report. Finally, the establishment of such commissions to evaluate whether or not a situation warrants referral to the ICC provides an appropriate filtering mechanism before the Council takes a decision.
1 UN Press Release SC/8313, 16 February 2005.
2 GA Res. 46/59, 9 December 1991.
3 See generally A. Berg, ‘The 1991 Declaration on Fact-finding by the United Nations’, 4 European Journal of International Law (1993) 1.
4 See Côte d’Ivoire: Le rapport de la Commission d’enquête de l’ONU sur les événements du 25 mars 2004, which, although not yet officially published, is available on the website of Radio France Internationale at http://www.rfi.fr/actufr/articles/053/article__27857.asp (visited 26 April 2005), at 
84, 86 and 95.
5 UN doc. E/CN.4/2005/3, 7 May 2004, 103.
6 Report of the independent expert on the situation of human rights in the Sudan, Emmanuel Akwei Addo, UN doc. E/CN.4/2005/11, 28 February 2005, 60.
7 Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against women, its causes and consequences, Yakin Ertürk, Visit to the Darfur Region of the Sudan, UN doc. E/CN.4/2005/72/Add.5, 23 December 2004, 9.
8 Report of the Representative of the Secretary-General on internally displaced persons, Francis M. Deng, Mission to the Sudan: The Darfur Crisis, UN doc. E/CN.4/2005/8, 27 September 2004.
9 Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, summary or Arbitraryarbitrary executions, Ms Asma Jahangir, Mission to the the Sudan, UN doc. E/CN.4/2005/7/Add.2, 6 August 2004, 57.
10 In addressing the Security Council, Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, characterized the findings of the Commission as ‘clear and thoroughly documented’, and as providing an eloquent and powerfully argued case for referring the situation to the International Criminal Court. UN Press Release SC/8313, 16 February 2005.
11 J.-M. Henckaerts and L. Doswald-Beck, Customary Humanitarian Law, Vol. 1: Rules (Cambridge: ICRC and Cambridge University Press, 2005).
12 UN doc. E/CN.4/2005/L.33/Rev.1, 18 April 2005.
13 UN doc. E/CN.4/2005/L.36/Rev.3, 21 April 2005.
14 A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, report of the Secretary General's High level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (United Nations, 2004), 256. The recommendation was clearly inspired in part by the Panel's strong criticism of ‘the glacial speed at which our institutions have responded to massive human rights violations in Darfur’, ibid., 42.