ABSTRACT
On 8 December 2006, outgoing United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed his concern that the UN and international society had not learned the lessons of the Holocaust, Rwanda and other genocidal tragedies of the twentieth century in light of the continuing large-scale suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan. In a speech to mark International Human Rights Day, Annan observed that
[t]he tragedy of Darfur has raged for over three years now, and still reports pour in of villages being destroyed by the hundred, and of the brutal treatment of civilians spreading into neighbouring countries. How can an international community which claims to uphold human rights allow this horror to continue?
