Photo credit: AP News
Nada Al-Nashif, the United Nations Human Rights Deputy High Commissioner, has said the warring parties in the Sudan conflict are acting with “total disregard for international law.”
She spoke at the 57th UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva. The event addressed various global issues, including political unrest, regression on women’s rights, and freedom of press and expression.
She said, “Our office is particularly alarmed by the use since the beginning of the conflict of sexual violence as a weapon of war. We have documented 97 incidents involving 172 victims, predominantly women and girls, which is a gross under-representation of the reality.”
UN-backed human rights investigators have urged for the creation of an “independent and impartial force” to protect civilians in Sudan’s war, blaming both sides for war crimes, including murder, mutilation and torture, and warning that foreign governments which arm and finance them could be complicit.
The fact-finding team, in their first report since being created by the UN’s main human rights body in October, also accused the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which are fighting Sudan’s army, and its allies of crimes against humanity, including rape, sexual slavery and persecution on ethnic or gender grounds.
The experts called for the expansion of an armed embargo on Sudan’s long-restive western Darfur region to the entire country. The findings from the team mandated by the 47-country Human Rights Council come as more than 10 million people have been driven from their homes as famine has broken out in one large camp for displaced people in Darfur.
The conflict, which started in 2023, has killed thousands of people, and humanitarian groups are struggling to gain access to people in need.
