UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has named a five-member panel led by Italian judge Antonio Cassese to investigate whether genocide has taken place in Sudan's Darfur region.
Created at the request of the UN Security Council in a US drafted resolution, the commission will also look into reports of widespread violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the western Sudanese area.
Three of the five panel members were to meet with Annan later today to set out a timetable for their work.
More than 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes and up to 50,000 killed by fighting in Darfur since a rebellion broke out in February 2003, according to the United Nations, which calls the area the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
The U.S. government believes genocide is taking place in Darfur, and two top UN human rights watchdogs told the council this month war crimes had probably occurred on "a large and systematic scale" there. The two were Argentine Juan Mendez, the special UN adviser for the prevention of genocide, and Canadian Louise Arbour, the UN high commissioner for human rights.
The Khartoum government blames the violence largely on anti-government rebels, although it has agreed to rein in nomadic Arab militias it is widely believed to have armed. The area's settled African residents accuse the so-called Janjaweed militias of widespread murder and rape and pillaging and torching their villages.
Cassese was the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a court based in The Hague that is looking into suspected war crimes in the Balkans including during Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.
Other commission members include Egyptian Mohammed Fayek, secretary-general of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, and Diego Garcia-Sayan, a former Peruvian foreign minister and justice minister.
Pakistani Hani Jilani, Annan's special representative on human rights defenders, and Ghanaian Therese Striggner Scott, chairwoman of of the Ghana Law Reform Commission, were also named to the commission.