UN human rights body holds special session on Sudan after hundreds killed in Darfur’s el-Fasher

GENEVA (AP) — The U.N.’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 the Rapid Support Forces 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 Türk, the U.N 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 Organization. RSF fighters went house to house, killing civilians and committing sexual assaults.

Türk 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.”

The military and the RSF, who were former allies, went to war in 2023. 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.

“Much of el-Fasher now is a crime scene,” Mona Rishmawi, a member of the team, told the session. She added that since the city fell into the hands of the RSF, her mission has collected “evidence of unspeakable atrocities, deliberate killings, torture, rape, abduction of for ransom, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances, all at the mass scale.”

“A comprehensive investigation is required to establish the full picture, but what we already know is devastating,” she added.

The council, which is made up of 47 U.N. member countries, does not have the power to force countries or others to comply, but can shine a spotlight on rights violations and help document them for possible use in places like the International Criminal Court.