Thank you.
I want to thank all the witnesses and those who have come today to bear witness to the witnesses. You're experiencing an awful lot of pain. The crisis is heartbreaking. The witnesses have provided a lot of helpful updates about the nature of the crisis.
Dr. Babb, I'd like to ask you about some of the structural features of the conflict and some of the governance issues in Sudan. As you know, just about a month ago, we got the first substantive ICC decision, I think, at the trial level, where Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman was convicted of 27 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. That's important, because those decisions really do document for history what happened largely in Darfur in 2003-04 around the so-called emergency plan that was constructed after the El Fasher airport attack.
To set the stage a little bit more, as you know, the ICC is intended to complement, not replace, national criminal systems. The principle of complementarity has the ICC stepping in when states don't or are unwilling to genuinely prosecute crimes in their territory. What concerns me is that since that time frame in the early 2000s, things have just continued to get worse, notwithstanding the presence of some international justice mechanisms there. The reports that I've received have indicated that notwithstanding transitional constitutional activity or reform agenda, any reform in the legislative branch is still stalled. Attempts at civilian governments are repeatedly derailed.
I'm wondering what your view is of Sudan's capacity for governance. How do we get out of this? What is the capacity for governance in 2025? What is the state of the judiciary domestically? We've had 25 years of civil society being ripped apart in Sudan. What do we need to do to regain some form of governance capacity in Sudan?