GENEVA - The new UN human rights watchdog agreed on Wednesday to send a high-level mission to Sudan's Darfur to probe allegations of worsening abuses against civilians.

A displaced family ride their donkey in search of water near the Argo IDP camp in Tawilla, north Darfur, September 6, 2006. The United Nations new human rights watchdog was struggling on Wednesday to agree on a mission of inquiry for Sudan's Darfur to probe charges of worsening abuses against civilians. [Reuters]

"The decision ... sends a united message that the ongoing violence and killing in Darfur is unacceptable and must stop," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement.

The move, seen as a way to increase international pressure on Khartoum to accept UN peacekeepers, coincided with a call from the US Sudan envoy for the country to act within the next week to help the UN bolster African Union (AU) forces.

Envoy Andrew Natsios said he had had productive talks with President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and they had agreed on steps to make progress to halt violence which aid officials say has killed more than 200,000 in the past three years.

"So the next week will be critically important for all of us to make this progress," Natsios told reporters in Khartoum.

Khartoum disputes the Darfur death toll and pins the blame for violations on rebel groups that are still fighting. It had no immediate comment on the plan to send a UN rights mission.

The proposal approved by the 47-state Human Rights Council, launched in June as part of U.N. reform and under pressure to show it can act effectively on Darfur, left the council chairman to name the five "highly qualified" team members. It was a consensus deal agreed after two days of tough haggling.

A leading think tank and an international human rights group said on the eve of a European Union summit on Thursday the EU should support tough new sanctions against Sudanese leaders for failing to end rights abuses in Darfur.

"It's time for the screws to be tightened on Khartoum," former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group, said in a statement.

He said Bashir had "just been laughing at the 'do this or else' resolutions" passed by the UN Security Council and needed to be pressed to stop attacks on civilians, accept a proposed new African Union-UN peacekeeping force, and cooperate fully in political settlement efforts.

"Millions of civilians are paying the price for nearly four years of unkept promises and empty commitments," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

NO-FLY ZONE

To back its 2005 demand that the Sudanese government cease offensive military flights over Darfur, the UN Security Council should immediately establish a "no-fly zone," supported by France and Germany in particular, if aerial attacks on civilians again intensified, the groups said.

Britain would agree to a no-fly zone as part of a UN-sanctioned "Plan B" to halt violence in Darfur, Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman said, citing comments made by Blair in Washington last week.

The comments implied he saw sanctions as some way off.

"If, in the next weeks and next couple of months or so the Sudanese government are not prepared to agree to the UN plan, then we've got to move to sanctions and we've got to move to tougher action," a transcript of Blair's remarks said.

"I think we should certainly consider the option of a no-fly zone to help people in Darfur, because it's a very, very serious situation and it's now spilling into other countries next door."

The International Criminal Court's prosecutor plans to charge suspects for atrocities in Darfur by February, nearly two years after the UN Security Council asked him to probe the Sudan region.

In a report to council members ahead of his address to the 15-member body on Thursday, prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said his office was preparing submissions to judges of the ICC's pretrial chamber.