Sudanese soldiers from the Rapid Support Forces unit in the East Nile province, Sudan, in June, 2019.Hussein Malla/The Associated Press
By supplying weapons and mercenaries to the perpetrators of civilian massacres, the United Arab Emirates has become complicit in the “large-scale extermination” of an ethnic minority in the Darfur region, Sudanese officials have told the International Court of Justice.
Sudan, in hearings at the World Court on Thursday, accused the oil-rich Gulf state of being the main driver of genocidal acts against the Masalit minority in the Darfur region in the west of the African country.
Logistical support by the UAE allowed the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to launch a wave of massacres that killed an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians, mainly from the Masalit ethnicity, in the West Darfur city of El Geneina in 2023, Sudan’s acting justice minister Muawia Osman told the court.
The genocide case at the court in The Hague – the highest United Nations judicial body – is the second such case in the past 16 months, following South Africa’s allegations last year that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Sudan, like South Africa, is asking the court to issue urgent orders against state actions that allegedly amount to genocide. South Africa succeeded in persuading the court to issue a series of emergency orders in the Gaza case, requiring Israel to provide immediate humanitarian aid to Gaza and to halt any military actions that could lead to the genocide of the Palestinian population.
Mr. Osman said the heavy weapons supplied by the UAE have helped the RSF to lay siege to the North Darfur city of El Fasher, where thousands of people have taken refuge. “There is an immediate risk of a repeat of the extermination of the Masalit at El Geneina,” he told the court.
“The direct logistic and other support that the UAE has provided and continues to provide to the RSF and their affiliated militia has been and continues to be the primary driving force behind genocide now taking place, including through killing, rape, forced displacement, looting and the restriction of public and private properties.”
A member of Sudan’s legal team, law professor Eirik Bjorge of the University of Bristol, cited UN reports that found credible evidence of the UAE sending weapons to the RSF on cargo flights to eastern Chad, near the Sudan border. The supplies were disguised as humanitarian goods for a Red Crescent hospital in Chad, but Red Cross officials were barred from the hospital, Prof. Bjorge said.
He also cited a widely reported incident in which Sudan arrested Colombian mercenaries – with recent UAE entry stamps in their passports – who had entered the country to join the RSF.
Sanctions by the United States and the European Union have targeted businesses in the UAE that allegedly bought weapons for the RSF with funds from gold smuggled from RSF-controlled regions of Sudan, he noted.
Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department concluded that the RSF and its allied militias had committed genocide in Sudan by systematically murdering men and children on an ethnic basis, while raping women and girls on a similarly targeted basis.
Since then, weapons and ammunition for the RSF have continued to arrive in Chad on cargo flights from the UAE, Prof. Bjorge told the court.
The UAE rejected all the accusations, calling them “outrageous” and insisting it had never supplied any weapons or related material to either side in the war since it began in 2023.
It noted that Sudan’s military is one of the two warring parties in the conflict and has been widely accused of war crimes. Reem Ketait, a senior official in UAE’s foreign ministry, told the court that Sudanese leaders were making false allegations “to deflect from their own responsibility for this war and their violations of international law.”
Many legal experts have predicted that the court will ultimately reject Sudan’s case on jurisdictional grounds. When it signed the Genocide Convention, UAE attached a reservation to a key clause, and the court has normally interpreted such reservations as an assertion of sovereignty, allowing states to opt out of the convention’s jurisdiction.
The Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights said the world court should reverse the “archaic technicality” of reservations to the Genocide Convention. In a recent statement on the Sudan case, the centre said the reservations allow governments to evade accountability by blocking the court from examining their suspected breaches of the Genocide Convention.