Assembly/AU/3(XIV) Page 10 of the decision of the 163rd Meeting of the PSC and the Plan of Action adopted by the Special Session of the Assembly held in Tripoli, the Commission was gearing up, as at the time of finalising this report, to send a multidisciplinary mission to the DRC to evaluate the situation and come up with recommendations on how best the AU and its Member States could provide support towards post-conflict reconstruction in the DRC. h) Sudan i) Southern Sudan/Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) 38. In January 2010, the implementation process of the CPA reached its fifth year. Over the past five years, there has been significant progress in the implementation of the CPA. At the same time, a number of challenges remain, which require the urgent attention and firm commitment of the Sudanese parties - the National Congress Party (NCP) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). 39. Sudan is scheduled to hold its national democratic elections in April 2010. This will be followed by the referendum for both Southern Sudan and the Abyei region to be conducted in January 2011, marking the end of the six-year Interim period of the CPA. The voter registration was successfully conducted from 1st November to 7 December 2009. In December 2009, the parties were able to agree and pass key bills relating to the referendum for Southern Sudan and that for the Abyei area, as well as laws regarding popular consultations for South Kordofan and Blue Nile. However, they could not agree on some articles of the national security bill, which was passed by the National Parliament on 20 December 2009, the SPLM voting against and other political parties boycotting the session. It is hoped that the remaining challenges, especially the delineation and demarcation of the North-South border, as well as the demarcation process of Abyei, in accordance with the ruling made in July 2009 by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PAC), will be resolved soon. On its part, the AU is taking steps to support the electoral process. In this regard, two pre-election assessment missions were dispatched to Sudan in October and December 2009, respectively. ii) Darfur 40. The major political event during the reporting period relates to the presentation of the report of the AU High Level Panel on Darfur to the PSC meeting at the level of Heads of State and Government, held in Abuja, on 29 October 2009. It should be recalled that the Panel was established pursuant to the PSC communiqué of 21 July 2008, with the mandate to make recommendations on how best to address the three interlocking issues of peace, justice and reconciliation in Darfur. The decision was subsequently endorsed by the 12th Ordinary Session of the Assembly, held in Addis Ababa from 1 to 3 February 2009. The AUPD was inaugurated on 19 March 2009 and, in pursuit of its mandate, consulted extensively with the people of Darfur, spending more than forty days in Sudan. The main message which the Panel heard and transmitted can be encapsulated in the definition of the crisis as “Sudan’s crisis in Darfur”. Indeed, while many other factors are at play, it is fundamentally the historical legacy of Sudan’s inequitable governance that led to armed uprisings in various parts of the country and the resulting cycle of conflicts. The Panel sees the Darfur crisis as a symptom of the wider crisis of the Sudanese nation, and it is its