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Sudan refuses to renew stay permit for senior UN official

Xinhua, May 23, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Sudanese government has refused to renew stay permit for a senior UN official, a move regarded by the UN as "de facto expulsion."

"The foreign ministry informed the UN in Sudan that the annual permit for Ivo Freijsen, who heads the Sudan office of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), will not be renewed when it expires on June 6," said a statement Sunday by the Humanitarian Country Team, the coordinating agency among various UN agencies and NGOs in Sudan.

The team expressed shock and disappointment at the de facto expulsion of Freijsen.

In the meantime, according to Sudan Tribune, Sudanese government sources refused to regard the move against the UN official as expulsion, saying it is a normal procedure particularly that the UN official has entered the country and assumed his tasks for a transitional period.

However, Sudan Tribune quoted informed sources at the Humanitarian Aid Commission, the government authority responsible for the work of the organizations in Sudan, as saying that it reflects the government's boredom of the negative reports about the humanitarian situation including inaccurate statistics, which the head of OCHA has kept on providing to the UN headquarters in New York.

Freijsen was appointed to his position by the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, on behalf of the UN Secretary-General, in February 2014. Endit