For protests to be effective in gathering support and achieving the desired outcome, strong leadership is an essential part of the process, writes Ngaire Woods

Six people have died in the capital of Khartoum, the seventh in Darfur, during protests in Sudan..

Sudan's embattled president has banned unauthorised public gatherings and granted sweeping powers to the police after imposing a state of emergency in response to more than two months of protests against his rule.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has left Nigeria after human rights lawyers and civil rights activists demanded his arrest, a Sudanese diplomat has said.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor was today found guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity by supporting brutal Sierra Leone rebels in return for blood diamonds.

Judges at an international war crimes tribunal have begun delivering landmark judgments in the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor.

George Clooney and his father were arrested yesterday during a protest outside the Sudanese embassy, and the actor said he has asked President Barack Obama to engage China on stopping a humanitarian crisis in northern Africa.

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir is in Tripoli on his first visit since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, in a bid to restore relations which soured in the last years of the Libyan dictator.

Syrian security forces opened fire on protesters outside a mosque in a Damascus suburb, close to a building that members of the Arab League monitoring mission were visiting, activists say.

Sudan will withdraw all its troops from the disputed Abyei region at the same time as the United Nations fully deploys its 4,200-strong force, the country’s UN ambassador has said.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has said he will not stand in the next presidential election in the restive African country.

China said it respects Southern Sudan’s vote for independence and wants peace and stability in the oil-rich region.

The family of Sudan’s top Islamist opposition leader said today that he has been arrested after calling for a Tunisia-style uprising in the country.

Women broke out in song and men wrapped themselves in flags as voters in Southern Sudan began casting ballots today in a week-long independence referendum likely to create the world’s newest nation about five years after the end of a brutal civil war.

The United Nations is preparing for the possibility of 2.8 million people being displaced if fighting breaks out over southern Sudan’s independence referendum, according to an internal report.

Clashes in a refugee camp in Sudan’s violent Darfur region left six people dead, peacekeepers said, days after violence elsewhere in the area claimed the lives of at least 37 people.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir was charged with genocide in Darfur today by the International Criminal Court on, piling further diplomatic pressure on his isolated regime.

Sudan’s president threatened to expel foreign observers over their recommendations to delay the country’s first multiparty elections in decades due in April.

APPEAL judges at The International Criminal Court in The Hague yesterday overturned a ruling that Sudan’s leader cannot be charged with genocide in Darfur.

Appeal judges at The International Criminal Court in The Hague today overturned a ruling that Sudan's leader cannot be charged with genocide in Darfur.

TWO Congolese militia leaders sent child soldiers and other fighters to wipe out a village in a revenge attack that left more than 200 men, women and children dead, a prosecutor told judges yesterday at the International Criminal Court.

Israel could face calls by the United Nations Security Council to refer alleged war crimes to the International Criminal Court in The Hague after a UN council backed a controversial report.

SUDANESE police fired tear gas and beat women protesting outside a court yesterday during the trial of a female journalist accused of violating the Islamic dress code by wearing trousers in public.

A Sudanese woman facing the lash for wearing trousers in public will have to wait another month to hear her fate, a judge decided today.

After bitter wrangling, Africa’s leaders agreed to denounce the International Criminal Court and refuse to extradite Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted for crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Despite years of inaction by Sudan’s government, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon held out hope that President Omar al-Bashir might still order his country’s courts to prosecute war crimes in Darfur and possibly avert his own war crimes trial by the International Criminal Court.

US President Barack Obama, declaring the violence in Darfur and inaction in the face of its worsening humanitarian crisis are “not acceptable,” pledged today to work more closely with the United Nations to bring peace to western Sudan’s conflict-wracked region.

The International Criminal Court today issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on war crimes charges in Darfur.

A former child soldier today described how he killed and mutilated victims during an attack on a church school when he was aged just 11.

CHILDREN snatched from Congo streets were trained to kill and forced to fight in a brutal ethnic war, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor said yesterday as the tribunal opened its historic first trial.

Children as young as nine were snatched from the streets and trained to kill by Congo warlord Thomas Lubanga, the International Criminal Court’s historic first trial heard today..

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir today offered a ceasefire in Darfur and promised to disarm militias in a new push to show the government is serious about ending the conflict.

Sudan President Omar al-Bashir today announced a unilateral cease-fire by government forces in the war-torn Darfur region and called for rebels to join in peace negotiations.

Efforts by activists to step up their Olympic-based protests met with a Chinese crackdown today.

THE African Union will ask the UN Security Council to suspend action for a year on an indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on Darfur genocide charges, Nigeria’s foreign affairs minister said last night.

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has today charged Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with genocide.

Sudan has cut ties with neighbouring Chad, following accusations that it supported rebels who attacked Khartoum.

CHAD’S prime minister demanded on Monday that the international community remove refugees who have fled to Chad from Sudan’s Darfur region.

A US diplomat was shot and wounded while in a car in Khartoum, Sudan, today in an attack that also killed the official’s Sudanese driver, the US Embassy said.

The African Union today handed over its Darfur peacekeeping mission to an understaffed joint UN force many believe will prove even worse at stemming the violence in Sudan’s war-torn western region.

European and African leaders were seeking to open a new era of closer relations, but their summit closed today with squabbling over trade and human rights.

Gillian Gibbons, the teacher jailed in Sudan for allowing her students to name a teddy bear Mohammed, arrived back in Britain today and declared: “I never imagined this would happen. I am just an ordinary primary school teacher.”

British Muslim politician Lord Nazir Ahmed says Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has agreed to pardon British teacher Gillian Gibbons, jailed after allowing her students to name a teddy bear Mohammed.

Only Sudan’s president has the power to pardon a British teacher sentenced to 15 days imprisonment for insulting Islam, said the justice minister today as British Muslim peers pushed to meet the Sudanese leader.

The British teacher facing 40 lashes for naming a teddy bear Mohammed was reported to police by an office worker at her Sudan school, it emerged today.

Sudan’s president accused Britain, the US and Europe of interfering over crisis-torn Darfur, saying they were interested only in his country’s “riches and resources”.

On the eve of a high-level UN meeting on Darfur, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court urged world leaders to “break their silence” and put justice at the top of the agenda because there will be no peace as long as alleged war criminals remain free in Sudan.

In a rare, high-profile visit to the West, Sudan’s president today met with the pope and Italy’s premier, and offered to declare a cease-fire with Darfur rebels to coincide with the start of UN-backed peace talks next month.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir today announced that new peace talks to end the four-year conflict in Darfur will start October 27 in Libya.

Non-African troops will not be needed for the new Darfur peacekeeping force in Sudan because countries on the continent have committed enough soldiers, the head of the African Union said.