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The UN’s top human rights body was holding a special one-day session on Friday to highlight hundreds of killings at a hospital Sudan‘S Darfur Other atrocities were committed last month by paramilitaries fighting in the area and the army.
human rights council A draft resolution calling on an existing team of independent experts to immediately investigate the killings and other rights violations in the city of El-Fashar was also being debated. rapid aid force Paramilitary.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk said, “The atrocities that are taking place in al-Fashar were anticipated and could have been stopped, but they were not stopped. They are the most serious crimes.”
Last month the RSF captured Al-Fashar, the capital of North Darfur, and stormed the city’s Saudi hospital, killing more than 450 people. World Health OrganizationRSF fighters went from house to house, killing civilians and committing sexual assaults,
Turk said, “None of us should be surprised” by reports that, since the RSF took control of the city, “mass killings of civilians, ethnically targeted executions, sexual violence including mass rape, kidnappings for ransom, large-scale arbitrary detentions, attacks on health facilities, medical staff and humanitarian workers, and other horrific atrocities.”
The army and the RSF, former allies, go to war in 2023. The WHO says at least 40,000 people have been killed in the fighting, and the United Nations says another 12 million have been displaced. Aid groups say the actual death toll may be many times higher.
The draft resolution, led by several European countries, offered little in the way of strong new language, although it did request a fact-finding team similar to the one the Council has already created to help identify and hold accountable those responsible for crimes in al-Fashar.
“Most of al-Fashar is now a crime scene,” Mona Rishmawi, a member of the team, told the session. He said that since the city fell into RSF hands, their mission had “collected evidence of unspeakable atrocities, deliberate killings, torture, rape, kidnapping for ransom, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance on a large scale.”
“A comprehensive investigation is needed to establish the full picture, but what we already know is devastating,” he said.
The council, made up of the 47 UN member states, does not have the power to force countries or others into compliance, but it can shed light on rights violations and help document them for potential use in places like the International Criminal Court.