Jolie, who is well known for her interest in children, was on a fact-finding trip to learn more about the situation of Haiti’s children, particularly those left homeless and orphaned by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Jolie is a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR. She met judges, lawyers, ministry of social affairs officials and other actors involved in children’s issues to get a sense of the problem.

Friday, she visited the United Nations Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) log base, where she was the star attraction at a reception.

There were no Brad Pitt sightings.

Source: Miami Herald

The evidence the prosecutor has presented is clear and compelling. Millions of people have been displaced; hundreds of thousands have been killed and, at the center of it all stands Sudanese President Omar al Bashir who has been indicted on seven counts of war crimes and five counts of crimes against humanity. (See pictures of Darfur in crisis.)

Bashir’s response to the indictments was an insult to the international community and hundreds of thousands who have died in Darfur. He kicked 16 international aid groups who were desperately trying to save his citizens out of his country. He even appointed one of the suspects, Ahmed Haroun, to a committee supposedly investigating human rights abuses in Darfur. You’ll struggle to find a better illustration of the culture of impunity that reigns in Khartoum.

Darfur has almost disappeared from the news, and experts now call it a “low intensity” conflict. But the intensity of the crisis has not lessened for those who are struggling to survive. More than 250,000 people from Darfur have lived destitute lives in refugee camps in Chad for six years now. Camps with more than two million internally displaced persons inside Darfur are even worse. Thirty percent of those displaced are school-age children. Girls leaving the camps are raped; boys leaving the camps are killed. They want an education; they want to go back to their villages, to their land; they want peace. But they also want justice.

I first went to Chad to visit refugees from Darfur in 2004. On that trip-more than five years ago-the refugees I met told me that the government was organizing the violence. About a year later, the international community came to the same conclusion. Some began to call the violence “mass atrocities.” Others ramped up the rhetoric and called it “crimes against humanity.” Nothing changed, so as the death toll mounted activists pushed the Bush administration to label it “genocide” — hoping somehow that term would arouse fear and horror.

But none of those words compelled us to intervene.

Today the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will stand in front of the UN Security Council. With painstaking detail he will report that Omar al Bashir — a man who should protect his citizens, has attacked Darfuris relentlessly and methodically for five years, and continues to do so.

According to the UN Charter, the Security Council exists “to promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security.” If the results of the Darfur investigation which they ordered don’t merit their active engagement, what does?

Today the Security Council member states will be faced with a simple decision — to embrace impunity or to end it.

As they are considering Bashir’s fate they are also considering their own.

Angelina Jolie is Co-Chair of the Jolie-Pitt Foundation and a refugee advocate

Source: Time

The World in 2008
November 2007
-Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie, goodwill ambassador to the UNHCR, hopes for progress in bringing war criminals to justice

On a recent mission for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, I had the opportunity to visit a refugee camp in Chad just across the border with Sudan. Sitting with a group of refugees, I asked them what they needed. These were people who had seen family members killed, neighbours raped, their villages burned and looted, their entire communities driven from their land. So it was no surprise when people began listing the things that could improve their lives just a little bit. Better tents, said one; better access to medical facilities, said another. But then a teenage boy raised his hand and said, with powerful simplicity, “Nous voulons un procès.” We want a trial.

Read article at original source or at Team Jolie.

The Hollywood actress and human rights campaigner made her plea to international governments in a new article for The Economist magazine, entitled The World in 2008, in which she urged tougher action against rogue leaders.

And Jolie, a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), hopes to see something done soon to combat the ongoing genocide in Darfur, western Sudan. She has visited neighbouring Chad twice once in 2003 and again earlier this year (07) – to speak to victims of the Sudanese atrocity and highlight their cause.

Writing in The Economist magazine, she says, “Accountability is perhaps the only force powerful enough to break the cycle of violence and retribution that marks so many conflicts.

“Through accountability we can begin the process of righting past wrongs, and even change the behaviour of some of the world’s worst criminals.

“I hope that the Sudanese government will hand over the government minister and the Janjaweed militia leader who have been indicted for war crimes (by the International Criminal Court in The Hague), and that the teenager I met in Chad will get the trial he seeks.

“I hope that those responsible for the atrocities in Darfur will be held to account, not only for that young man’s sake, but for the world’s.”