Sudan's parliament has passed a bill setting out the conditions for a referendum, due in January 2011, on independence for the country's oil-rich south.

MPs representing the south walked out before the vote, criticising the bill's provisions that allow South Sudanese living in the north to vote in the referendum. They say people living in the north are less likely to back the south's independence. South Sudan secured the independence referendum as part of a 2005 peace accord that ended two decades of civil war that killed two million people. The civil war pitted the mostly Muslim and Arabic north against the largely Christian and animistic south.

Sudan's location in Africa (Photo: Wikipedia)