Rights body holds special session on Sudan after hundreds killed in Darfur

Geneva: The UN’s top human rights body was holding a one-day special session Friday to highlight hundreds of killings at a hospital in Sudan’s Darfur region and other atrocities committed last month by paramilitary forces fighting the army.

The Human Rights Council was also debating a draft resolution calling on an existing team of independent experts to carry out an urgent inquiry into the killings and other rights violations in the city of el-Fasher by RSF paramilitary. “The atrocities that are unfolding in el-Fasher were foreseen and preventable, but they were not prevented. They constitute the gravest of crimes,” said Volker Turk, the UN human rights chief.

Last month the RSF seized el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and rampaged through the Saudi Hospital in the city, killing more than 450 people, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). RSF fighters went house to house, killing civilians and committing sexual assaults.

Turk said “none of us should be surprised” by reports, since the RSF took control of the city, of “mass killings of civilians, ethnically targeted executions, sexual violence including gang rape, abductions for ransom, widespread arbitrary detentions, attacks on health facilities, medical staff and humanitarian workers, and other appalling atrocities.” WHO says the fighting has killed at least 40,000 people, and the United Nations says another 12 million have been displaced. Aid groups say the true death toll could be many times higher.

The draft resolution, led by several European countries, offered little in the way of strong new language though it requested a fact-finding team that the council has already created to try to identify those responsible for the crimes in el-Fasher and help bring them to account.