Meeting with UN Special Rapporteur for Sudan Provides Insight and Direction for CPI Interns

On Sunday, June 21st a group of CPI interns met with Dr. Sima Samar, UN Special Rapporteur for Sudan. Fresh with knowledge from her recent trip to Sudan from May 25 to June 4th, Dr. Samar provided the group of interns with great insight and important information about issues on the ground.

Although Dr. Samar expressed disappointment in the recent decisions of the Human Rights Council to replace the Special Rapporteur for Sudan with an Independent Expert, she was glad to see that a group of young students and graduates were working on such significant and critical issues, as she remarked, "The young generation are the ones that own the planet ."

Dr. Samar noted that the issue of child abductions is a recurring problem across many different tribes in South Sudan. Attacks from the LRA have only made issues worse by making it increasingly difficult to identify the perpetrators of violent child abductions. Dr. Samar remarked that the Government of South Sudan has little capacity to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions, a critical problem to the successful implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).