Worsening violence in Sudan’s Darfur needs an urgent international response, but the fear is that help will again arrive late, a top United Nations human rights envoy said on Thursday.

“The situation is unraveling … and if it comes apart, the danger to civilians will be very great,” said Juan Mendez, U.N. special adviser on the prevention of genocide.

Mendez, who presented a report to the U.N. Security Council last October warning of growing bloodshed in the troubled western Sudan region, told Reuters that differences within the 15-member body acted as a brake on action.

“We are always moving slowing and in cumbersome ways, and doing as little as possible,” he said. “The 2_kommentar problem is that we have a bottleneck in the Security Council because of the difficulty of getting consensus,” he added in an interview.(reuters)