The International Criminal Court (ICC) is bringing three charges of genocide against Sudanese president Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir for crimes committed in Darfur. This is the second arrest warrant the court has issued against Bashir.

The court ruled that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Bashir acted with specific intent to destroy, in part, the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups and should stand trial for “genocide by killing, genocide by causing serious bodily or mental harm and genocide by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction.”

The charge sheet cites poisoning of water wells, rape, torture, expulsions and killings as part of the Sudanese government’s “genocidal policy” against these groups.

This second arrest warrant will be added to a warrant the court issued in March last year, in which it said that Bashir should stand trial for five counts of crimes against humanity and two counts of war crimes.

The ruling is a victory for ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo who tried to include genocide charges in last year’s indictment, but the court’s judges ruled that he had provided insufficient evidence to add the crime.

The appeals chamber earlier this year overruled the decision, concluding that the pretrial judges applied “an erroneous standard of proof.”

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