Human Rights Violations in Sudan: Analytical Report (2025–2026)

Introduction

The armed conflict in Sudan, which erupted on 15 April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), escalated by 2025 into the world's largest humanitarian crisis. This analytical report covers the period from January 2025 to early 2026 and systematises data on human rights violations documented by leading international organisations.[1]

According to estimates published in Science, the total number of deaths from all conflict-related causes may reach 150,000.[2] On 7 January 2025, the US Department of State formally determined that the RSF and allied militias had committed genocide.[3]

Freedom House's Freedom in the World 2025 report assigned Sudan an aggregate score of 2 out of 100, designating the country as 'Not Free' — one of the lowest ratings globally.[4]

Civilian Casualties

According to OHCHR, between 1 January and 30 June 2025, the deaths of at least 3,384 civilians were documented, predominantly in Darfur, Kordofan, and Khartoum. This represents nearly 80% of all civilian casualties (4,238) recorded throughout the whole of 2024.[1] Over the full year of 2025, at least 11,300 civilians were killed — nearly triple the figure for 2024. OHCHR data points to a more than two-and-a-half-fold increase in killings of civilians.[5]

In April 2025, the RSF launched an offensive on El Fasher and IDP camps in North Darfur, killing at least 527 people, including over 270 in the Zamzam and Abu Shouk camps. During the three-day assault on Zamzam camp, at least 1,013 civilians were killed.[6] In March 2025, SAF airstrikes on Tora market in North Darfur killed at least 350 civilians, including 13 members of a single family.[5]

In October 2025, RSF fighters stormed the Al-Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, indiscriminately killing medical workers, patients, and caregivers. The WHO estimated that 460 people were murdered and six medics were kidnapped. An RSF missile strike on a mosque in El Fasher killed 84 worshippers at prayer, making it the bloodiest single day the city had seen since the onset of the conflict.[5]

At least 990 civilians were unlawfully killed outside the conduct of hostilities, including through summary executions. Between February and April 2025, the number of such killings tripled, largely due to a surge in summary executions in Khartoum after the SAF recaptured RSF-held territory.[1]

Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing

The UN Fact-Finding Mission established that the situation around El Fasher exhibits clear hallmarks of genocide by the RSF against the Zaghawa and Fur communities. Genocide Watch classified the situation as Stage Nine of the Ten Stages of Genocide: Extermination.[7][8]

Human Rights Watch documented large-scale attacks by the RSF and allied militias against the Masalit and other non-Arab communities in El Geneina (West Darfur). In July 2023, a mass grave of 87 Masalit civilians was discovered. According to HRW, the deliberate targeting of the Masalit with the apparent objective of permanently displacing them from the region constitutes ethnic cleansing.[9]

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan announced his intention to seek arrest warrants for those accused of atrocities in West Darfur. In July 2025, the ICC Deputy Prosecutor reported reasonable grounds to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed in Darfur.[10] UN Security Council Resolution 2791 (2025) extended the sanctions regime (asset freezes, travel bans) and the arms embargo on Darfur until September 2026.[11]

Sexual Violence

As of 31 May 2025, OHCHR had documented 368 incidents of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in Sudan, involving at least 521 victims. The Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) documented nearly 1,300 cases of sexual and gender-based violence across 14 states since the war began, with the RSF blamed for the overwhelming majority of attacks.[12] The UN Fact-Finding Mission established that sexual violence in Sudan is not incidental: it is systematic, widespread, and used as a weapon of war. Girls as young as seven years old have been sexually assaulted.[7]

Women and girls from non-Arab tribes in Darfur — Masalit, Berti, Fur, and Zaghawa — were directly targeted. In Al-Gezira state, witnesses described RSF forces singling out lighter-skinned girls and women aged 14 to 30 as 'trophies.'[13] During the three-day RSF assault on Zamzam camp in April 2025, at least 104 survivors (75 women, 26 girls, and 3 boys), mostly from the Zaghawa ethnic group, were subjected to rape, gang rape, and sexual slavery.[6]

OHCHR is increasingly documenting cases of unwanted pregnancies resulting from rape. Children born of rape often face rejection from their families. In several villages in Al-Gezira state, women have taken their own lives following assaults.[12] The number of people at risk of gender-based violence has tripled in two years to 12.1 million. With 80% of hospitals in conflict-affected areas non-functional, maternal deaths have spiked and women's access to sexual and reproductive healthcare is severely hampered.[14]

Displacement and Refugees

Sudan is experiencing the world's largest displacement crisis. According to UNHCR, by the end of 2025, approximately 2.5 million Sudanese refugees had been recorded — a 65% increase since the onset of hostilities and nearly triple the pre-war figures.[15] In total, approximately 13 million people have been forced to flee their homes since the conflict began, with roughly 8.6 million remaining internally displaced within Sudan and over 4 million crossing international borders.[29]

Over 2.7 million Sudanese have fled to neighbouring countries: Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Central African Republic. Egypt hosts the largest displaced population from Sudan — over 1.5 million officially registered refugees. Since January 2025, Chad has received 180,130 individuals, bringing the cumulative total to 904,000.[15]

Despite the ongoing conflict, approximately 5 million IDPs returned to their places of origin in the first half of 2025 — 2.5 times the number of returns in the same period of 2024. However, most returns occurred under adverse conditions: continuing insecurity, destroyed infrastructure, and severely limited or absent basic services.[15]

Famine and Food Security

In September 2025, an estimated 21.2 million people — 45% of the population — faced high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 and above), including 375,000 in Phase 5 (Famine). This represents the world's largest food crisis.[16]

Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) rates from screening data are alarmingly high, ranging from 38% to 75% in El Fasher and reaching 29% in Kadugli. Outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and measles continue to spread in areas where health, water, and sanitation systems have collapsed.[17] Only 28% of Sudan's $4.16 billion humanitarian plan for 2025 has been funded. The approximately $806 million refugee response plan for Chad was less than 5% funded as of May 2025. Unprecedented aid cuts by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union since January 2025 have significantly weakened the humanitarian response.[30]

Children in Conflict

According to the UN, 15 million children require humanitarian assistance — double the number at the start of 2023. The number of grave violations against children has surged by 1,000% in two years: killings, maiming, abductions, recruitment, sexual violence, attacks on schools and hospitals.[18]

Both parties to the conflict have recruited hundreds of children in Darfur and eastern Sudan. Local leaders serve as key facilitators, acting at the request of RSF commanders or allied militias. The faz'a tradition allows tribal leaders to mobilise community members, including children, to engage in combat.[19] Approximately 90% of children are out of school. Famine is spreading and vaccination rates are dropping. UNICEF is appealing for $1 billion for its Sudan operations in 2025, yet only $266.6 million is available, most of it carried over from 2024.[19]

Torture and Arbitrary Detention

According to OHCHR, tens of thousands of people, including women and children, have been held without charge in overcrowded facilities since the outbreak of the conflict. Former detainees describe severe and frequent beatings, extreme overcrowding, minimal ventilation, limited access to sanitation, and inadequate food and water.[20]

Many detainees have died in custody due to lack of medical treatment, in both RSF and SAF facilities. The RSF has used children as young as 14 as guards (Soba prison). Children as young as 13 are held alongside adults. Cases of sexual violence and exploitation against female detainees have been documented.[20] REDRESS documented systematic patterns of arbitrary arrest, detention, ill-treatment (amounting to torture), and death in custody, indicating widespread and systematic practices — if not deliberate policies — adopted by the warring parties. Many documented violations may amount to international crimes.[21]

Press Freedom

According to the Sudanese Journalists' Syndicate, 32 journalists have been killed since the civil war began. CPJ has documented the killing of at least 15 journalists and media workers; in 2025 alone, 7 members of the press were killed.[22]

In December 2025, RSF fighters executed journalist Taj al-Sir Ahmed Suleiman, director of the Sudan News Agency (SUNA) office in El Fasher, and his brother in their home. In May 2025, journalist Hassan Fadl Al-Mawla Mousa was shot dead during the RSF capture of Al-Nuhud. In October 2025, journalist Ahmed Mohamed Saleh Sayyidna was killed in shelling of El Fasher.[23]

CPJ received reports that 13 journalists and media workers in El Fasher went missing under a communications blackout in October 2025 — among the last sources of independent information from the besieged city. At least two were abducted by the RSF. Freelancer Muammar Ibrahim, who contributed to Al-Jazeera, was abducted on 26 October 2025; the RSF accused him of 'bias' for describing them as a 'militia.'[22]

Internet and Digital Rights

Since the onset of the conflict, both parties have deployed internet shutdowns as a weapon to block information flows. The RSF seized Sudatel's data centre in December 2023. In February 2024, the RSF enforced a total telecommunications blackout in retaliation against a similar SAF-imposed blackout in Darfur.[24]

The economic cost of internet shutdowns in Sudan in 2025 is estimated at $66.6 million (Top10VPN). The blackouts have severely impeded the work of humanitarian organisations and human rights monitoring. Over 15 human rights defenders interviewed by Amnesty International in Kenya and Uganda reported being unable to document ongoing violations.[24]

LGBTQ Rights

Same-sex relations are criminalised under Section 148 of Sudan's 1991 Penal Code. A first offence is punishable by 100 lashes and up to 5 years' imprisonment; a second offence carries up to 5 years with flogging; a third offence is punishable by life imprisonment or death. In 2020, capital punishment and corporal punishment were removed, but sodomy remains a criminal offence.[25]

According to the EUAA (2025), new rules of evidence permit the use of digital evidence (private chats, photographs on mobile phones) as the basis for prosecution for homosexuality. In the context of the conflict, LGBTQ persons face heightened violence: a documented case describes a gay man detained by the RSF on suspicion of collaborating with the SAF who, upon discovery of his sexual orientation via his Tinder profile, was subjected to intensified torture.[26]

Attacks on Humanitarian Workers

2025 is on track to become the deadliest year on record for humanitarian workers: by August 2025, 265 aid workers had been killed in deliberate attacks globally — a nearly 50% increase compared to the same period in 2024. In Sudan, over 100 humanitarian workers have been killed since the onset of the conflict, including 60 in the first half of 2025 alone.[27]

Since the war began, MSF has recorded over 80 violent incidents targeting their staff, infrastructure, vehicles, and supplies. Clinics have been looted and destroyed, medicines stolen, and healthcare workers assaulted, threatened, or killed. In January 2025, an MSF ambulance transporting a woman in labour was attacked; a female caretaker was shot and died.[28] On 11 April 2025, the RSF executed 9 humanitarian workers from Relief International — the only international NGO operating in Zamzam camp — during the assault on the camp.[6]

Summary Statistics

Analytical Assessment

The central feature of the Sudan crisis is the catastrophic and simultaneous failure of both warring parties — the SAF and the RSF — to observe even the most basic norms of international humanitarian law, resulting in what multiple international bodies have characterised as genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity on a scale not seen in the region since the Darfur crisis of the early 2000s. The formal determination of genocide by the US Department of State in January 2025, combined with the findings of the UN Fact-Finding Mission identifying clear hallmarks of genocide against the Zaghawa and Fur communities, places the Sudan conflict in a category of exceptional severity. The state has not merely failed to protect its civilian population; the state's own armed forces and the paramilitary forces it once sponsored are the principal perpetrators of the violence. This fundamental collapse of the state's protective function is, in my assessment, the defining characteristic of the current situation.

The scale of sexual violence documented in this report is not incidental to the conflict but integral to it. The UN Fact-Finding Mission's conclusion that sexual violence is systematic, widespread, and used as a weapon of war is supported by evidence from OHCHR, Amnesty International, and SIHA across multiple states and over a sustained period. The ethnic targeting of women and girls from non-Arab communities — Masalit, Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti — indicates that sexual violence is being deployed not merely as a tool of terror but as an instrument of ethnic destruction. The documented consequences, including unwanted pregnancies, suicide, family rejection, and the collapse of reproductive healthcare services, demonstrate that the harm extends far beyond the immediate act of assault. In my opinion, the systematic and ethnically targeted nature of this sexual violence reinforces the genocide determination and constitutes one of the most serious dimensions of the crisis.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan is inseparable from the human rights violations. The confirmation of famine conditions in El Fasher and Kadugli, the fact that 21.2 million people face acute food insecurity, and the displacement of over 13 million people are not merely consequences of armed conflict in general terms — they are the direct results of deliberate strategies by both parties: the obstruction of humanitarian access, the destruction of agricultural infrastructure, the looting of food stocks and medical supplies, and the systematic targeting of aid workers. The execution of nine Relief International staff at Zamzam camp by the RSF is emblematic of a broader pattern in which humanitarian operations are not merely impeded but actively attacked. The fact that only 28% of the humanitarian response plan has been funded, compounded by unprecedented aid cuts from major donor states, means that the international community's capacity to mitigate these harms is severely diminished at precisely the moment when it is most needed.

The evidence concerning children, press freedom, digital rights, detention conditions, and LGBTQ rights collectively reinforces the assessment that Sudan's crisis is not confined to a single domain of human rights but constitutes a total breakdown of the rule of law and the protective obligations of the state. Fifteen million children require humanitarian assistance; 90% are out of school; child recruitment has surged; journalists are being killed and disappeared; the internet is weaponised as a tool of information control; and detainees, including children, are subjected to torture and death in custody. LGBTQ individuals face heightened persecution in the context of the conflict, with digital surveillance creating new vectors of risk. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that civilians in Sudan — particularly those belonging to non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, women and girls, children, displaced populations, and members of other vulnerable groups — face a level of violence, persecution, and deprivation that constitutes one of the most severe humanitarian and human rights emergencies in the world today. If the evidence is accepted, including the material cited from OHCHR, HRW, Amnesty International, the ICC, IPC, UNICEF, and UNHCR, then in my opinion the country conditions in Sudan are such that return to any conflict-affected area would expose individuals to a real risk of serious harm.