On July 22, 2009, a five-member arbitral tribunal, operating under the Permanent Court of Arbitration's Optional Rules for Arbitrating Disputes Between Two Parties of Which Only One Is a State, rendered its 4-1 decision in the excess-of-mandate and boundary-delimitation case between the government of Sudan (Government) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The tribunal was asked (1) to determine whether the Abyei Boundaries Commission (ABC) Experts (Experts) had, in their final report (Report), exceeded their mandate, which was "to define and demarcate the area of the nine Ngok Dinka Chiefdoms transferred to Kordofan in 1905, and, if so, (2) to delimit that region, known as the Abyei area (see map). The tribunal found that the Experts had not exceeded their mandate with respect to the southern boundary of the Abyei area, the northern limit of permanent Ngok Dinka habitation, or the survival of established secondary (seasonal) rights on either side of the northern boundary. The tribunal did find, however, that the Experts had exceeded their mandate with respect to the delimitation of the area of shared secondary rights in the north, and with respect to the delimitation of the northern, western, and eastern boundaries of the Abyei area for failing to state sufficient reasons for how they implemented their mandate. The tribunal accepted the possibility of a partial nullity of the Experts' Report and set aside only those decisions in the Report that were rendered in excess of the Experts' mandate.
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