Sophie Rosenberg's blog

Over the past two weeks, Congress has held two high-level hearings on the ongoing crises in Sudan and South Sudan, continuing to spotlight the unresolved issues that are so crucial to improving stability and security. Both events drew packed rooms—Tuesday’s even filling an overflow room—highlighting the strong public interest in the increasingly dire humanitarian concerns in Sudan’s border region.  Read More »

President Salva Kiir, leader of the world’s newest state of South Sudan, addressed the United Nations General Assembly last week and met on the sidelines of the forum with other world leaders, including President Obama. Just six years ago, South Sudan was embroiled in a civil war, one of the longest and deadliest of the 20th century. How much credit for that transition is due to the United Nations?

Plenty, according to a panel of current and former U.S. officials to the United Nations who gathered recently for an event at the Center for American Progress.  Read More »

The prosecution and defense teams presented their final statements last week in the International Criminal Court’s first case to go to trial, The Prosecutor v. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, representing a landmark for this unprecedented institution of international justice.   Read More »

Several recent developments in Sudan regarding the conflict in South Kordofan, where over 200,000 individuals have been killed, injured, or forcibly displaced according to UN reports, highlight the volatility that currently exists in the Sudanese political arena. President Omar Hassan al-Bashir recently declared a ceasefire in South Kordofan, but reports of continued fighting and aerial bombardment by the Sudan Armed Forces, or SAF, indicate that this truce has already been broken.  Read More »

A new U.N. report published last month caused a few tremors in an already politically precarious region of East Africa. The Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, which was charged with examining compliance with arms embargoes on the two countries, submitted a meticulously documented 417-page report that sheds light on official Eritrean complicity in an expansive network of illicit activities, ranging from arms trafficking, to people smuggling, to support of armed groups in neighboring countries, and raises questions of Eritrea involvement in the new state of South Sudan.  Read More »