A/HRC/4/80 page 6 I. INTRODUCTION A. The High-Level Mission 1. Mandate 1. On 13 December 2006, at its fourth special session, the Human Rights Council adopted by consensus decision S-4/101 on the situation of human rights in Darfur, in which it decided to dispatch a High-Level Mission (HLM) with the mandate “to assess the human rights situation in Darfur and the needs of the Sudan in this regard … and to report to the Council at its fourth session to be held from 12 March to 5 April 2007”. 2. Members and staff 2. On 26 January 2007, HRC President, Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba announced the appointment of the members of the Mission. The members, serving in their personal capacities, included Professor and Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams (Head of Mission), Professor Bertrand Ramcharan, the Honorable Mart Nutt, H.E. Ambassador Makarim Wibisono, H.E. Ambassador Patrice Tonda, as well as the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Sudan, Dr. Sima Samar. On 14 February 2007, H.E. Ambassador Makarim Wibisono discontinued his participation in the mission and thus did not take part in the preparation of this report. The HLM was supported and accompanied by a team of staff appointed by the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The members of the Mission would like to express their appreciation to the members of the OHCHR secretariat for their extreme professionalism and dedication to the successful completion of the Mission. 3. Terms of reference and working methods 3. Convening on 5 February in Geneva, the HLM adopted its terms of reference, focusing on our mandate “to assess the human rights situation in Darfur, and the needs of the Sudan in this regard, and to report to the Council at its fourth session”. We determined that assessing the situation did not require a human rights fact-finding mission, as such. Volumes of documentation of abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL) in Darfur from early 2003 to today are abundant. Therefore, for our assessment, we meant to gather as much information on the current situation from as many sources as possible. Our intention was then to give our collective informed perspective on the human rights situation in Darfur. 4. We understood assessing the needs of the Sudan vis-à-vis the human rights situation in Darfur to include needs of the Government of the Sudan, civil society and affected communities and individuals that the Government, in the first instance, has the responsibility to protect. We noted that the Human Rights Council decision welcomed the signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), urged its full implementation and called upon non-signatories to sign and all parties to observe the ceasefire. The DPA was negotiated in 2005, and signed on 5 May 2006. We therefore decided that our assessment of the situation would primarily focus on the period from January 2005 to March 2007. 5. We convened in Geneva from 5 to 9 February to begin our work planning and consultation. While in Geneva, we consulted a number of organizations and individuals and