Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is the 12th and highest-profile suspect -- all of them Africans -- sought for alleged war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
The court in The Hague, Netherlands, founded in 2002, previously opened cases against a Sudanese official and a militia leader for crimes in the Darfur region of Sudan. Both suspects are at large in Sudan.
It also has charged rebel leaders in long-running conflicts in Congo, Uganda and the Central African Republic.
The court, the world's sole permanent war crimes court, has been criticized for pursuing only African suspects up to this point. Rwandan President Paul Kagame -- whose central African nation isn't a party to the court -- has described it as a new form of Western imperialism.
In Uganda, Congo and Central African Republic, however, governments invited the court to intervene because their judiciaries lacked the capacity to prosecute cases. In Sudan, the U.N. Security Council asked the court to investigate crimes in Darfur because Sudanese authorities appeared unwilling to do so.
Separate war-crimes prosecutions against former Liberian President Charles Taylor and former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic have been carried out by temporary courts.
Taylor's trial, focusing on his involvement in Sierra Leone's civil war, continues at The Hague by a special court for Sierra Leone; Milosevic died before his trial by the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia could be concluded, also at The Hague.
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