The Hague  - Chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo has appealed against the decision by the ICC not to charge acting Sudanese President Mohammed al-Bashir with genocide, it emerged Friday.

On March 4, The Hague-based court decided to charge al-Bashir with crimes against humanity and war crimes, but excluding genocide, and issued a warrant for his arrest.

The appeal dated March 10 referred to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and said genocide could also be defined as "dictating living circumstances to a particular group" intended to kill that group partially or entirely.

Moreno Ocampo said starvation in the refugee camps in Darfur resulted in a "slow death" for the refugees, while "mass-scale rapes" committed by al-Bashir's militia were used as a "weapon of genocide". (dpa)