George Clooney Arrest Photos And Video: Actor Stands Up For Sudan

George Clooney was arrested for trespassing on private property on Friday while protesting human rights abuses outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington.

The actor has charged the government of President Omar al-Bashir with instigating a humanitarian crisis, and initiating a campaign of murder against Sudanese citizens. Along with a group of protestors, Clooney rallied outside the embassy to demand that the (Sudanese) government in Khartoum... stop randomly killing its own innocent men, women and children. Stop raping them, and stop starving them.

Clooney was arrested alongside his father Nick Clooney, U.S. Representative Jim Moran (D-Va), Martin Luther King III and NAACP president Ben Jealous. They were taken away in a police van.

The arrest of such a high-profile figure will certainly accomplish one of Clooney's main goals, which is to draw attention to Sudan before there is a real humanitarian disaster.

At the end of the protest, Clooney, his hands already secured behind his back by plastic cuffs, shouted stop raping them and stop starving them. That's all that we ask, both to the crowd and the Sudanese government.

Clooney has been working for years to bring the situation in Sudan into the international spotlight. The actor and humanitarian first focused on the genocide in Darfur, for which Bashir has been indicted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court. Clooney has since moved to the ethnic conflicts surrounding the independence of South Sudan.

After decades of violence and civil war in Sudan, the government agreed to let South Sudan became its own nation, and last summer, South Sudan became the world's newest country.

However, the old conflict and old allegiances, which fall along ethnic and political lines, have not gone away.

Both Sudan and South Sudan are guilty of particular aggressions, but Clooney's recent work has focused on Bashir's campaign against the Nuba people in South Kordofan.

South Kordofan is a border state in Sudan, but the indigenous people in the state's Nuba Mountains, who are not of Arab descent like the majority of the country, tended to side with South Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War that raged from 1983 until 2005.

For months, Clooney has been working with the Satellite Sentinel Project to monitor Bashir's alleged crimes by satellite. Since the project began, SSP has found detailed photographic evidence of atrocities allegedly committed by the Sudanese government, including mass graves, air strikes on civilians and mass displacement.

Clooney has also visited Sudan on number of occasions. His last trip ended this week, and he brought back a short video that documents his experiences dodging missiles and visiting the wounded in the Nuba Mountains.

On Wednesday, the actor presented SSP's findings to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he said that it is absolutely without question a war crime that we saw firsthand.

He also met with President Barack Obama on Wednesday to discuss the situation in Sudan.