GENEVA (AP) — The U.N.’s top human rights body held a one-day special session Friday to…
GENEVA (AP) — The U.N.’s top human rights body held a one-day special session Friday to highlight this hundreds of murders in a hospital in the Sudanese region of Darfur and other atrocities committed last month by paramilitary forces fighting the army.
The Human Rights Council also debated a draft resolution calling on an existing team of independent experts to conduct an urgent investigation into the killings and other rights violations in the town of el-Fasher by the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries.
“The atrocities in el-Fasher were foreseeable and preventable, but they were not prevented. They constitute the most serious crimes,” said UN human rights chief Volker Türk.
Last month, the RSF captured el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and swept through it the Saudi hospital in the city, killing more than 450 people, according to the World Health Organization. RSF fighters went from house to house, killing civilians and committing sexual crimes.
Türk said that “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, kidnappings for ransom, widespread arbitrary detentions, attacks on health facilities, medical staff and humanitarian workers, and other terrible atrocities.”
The army and the RSF, who were former allies, went to battle by 2023. The WHO says the fighting has killed at least 40,000 people, and the United Nations says another 12 million people have been displaced. Aid groups say the actual death toll could be many times higher.
The draft resolution, led by several European countries, offered little strong new language, although it did call for an investigative team that the council had already established to try to identify those responsible for the crimes in El-Fasher and help hold them accountable.
“Much of el-Fasher is now a crime scene,” Mona Rishmawi, a member of the team, told the session. She added that since the city fell to the RSF, its mission has “collected evidence of unspeakable atrocities, deliberate killings, torture, rape, kidnapping for ransom, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances, all on a mass scale.”
“A comprehensive investigation is needed to determine the full picture, but what we already know is devastating,” she added.
The council, made up of 47 U.N. member states, does not have the power to force countries or others to comply, but can highlight rights violations and help document them for possible use in places like the International Criminal Court.
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