A Humanitarian Catastrophe and the Failure of International Accountability
Sudan is currently facing a humanitarian catastrophe of staggering proportions. Millions of people have been displaced, and entire communities are struggling to survive in conditions of extreme hardship. The people of Darfur, in particular, have endured over 23 years of conflict, with more than three million internally displaced individuals caught between violence and abandonment. Their lives are shaped by fear, hunger, and the constant uncertainty of when they might be forced to flee again. Families that once had homes, farms, and livelihoods now live in makeshift shelters, carrying the trauma of lost loved ones and repeated displacement.
These communities have shown extraordinary resilience, but resilience should not be mistaken for acceptance of the status quo. They deserve safety, dignity, and the opportunity to rebuild their lives. However, the world’s attention has drifted, meaningful protection has not materialized, and the institutions entrusted with delivering justice have faced profound constraints in responding to the scale of atrocities committed in Darfur.
Despite its mandate and past efforts, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been operating under significant political, operational, and access-related challenges that no single institution can overcome alone. It cannot and should not be expected to shoulder this mandate alone. Ensuring accountability and safeguarding the rights of Darfur’s displaced communities require sustained international engagement, genuine political will, and coordinated support.
The post-World War II experience shows that meaningful accountability is most effective after the cessation of hostilities, when institutions can function and evidence can be preserved systematically. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals were possible precisely because the war had ended and the international community could enforce justice without the constraints of an active conflict. In contrast, the Darfur conflict has faced profound obstacles because attempts to pursue justice, most notably through the ICC, were initiated during an ongoing, fragmented war. Insecurity, political fragmentation, and the absence of a cooperative state authority have repeatedly obstructed investigations, witness protection, and the enforcement of arrest warrants.
This stands in stark contrast to the early 1990s, when UN Secretary-General Boutros Ghali advanced a robust peace-enforcement agenda, enabling the UN to impose ceasefires and create conditions conducive to accountability in conflicts such as those in Cambodia and Mozambique. However, in Sudan, the absence of a sustained ceasefire has prevented such progress. A temporary cessation of hostilities could facilitate credible accountability by granting access to affected regions, ensuring the protection of survivors, and allowing judicial mechanisms to function without fear of intimidation.
Justice for the victims of Darfur can only be achieved under circumstances similar to those of the post-war tribunals established after the Second World War.
The Political and Military Landscape in Sudan
Sudan has been governed by the National Islamic Front (NIF) since the 1989 military coup, consolidating a highly centralized and militarized political order that has led to prolonged conflicts in Southern Sudan, Blue Nile, and Darfur. Over the subsequent three decades, state authorities relied on coercive security structures and counterinsurgency strategies that systematically targeted civilian populations, contributing to large-scale displacement and widespread human rights violations documented by the Human Rights report in 2004.
In response to the mass atrocities committed in Darfur, the ICC issued arrest warrants for five senior officials, including former President Omar al-Bashir. However, the international community’s inability to secure cooperation from Sudanese authorities and regional actors has prevented the enforcement of these warrants, thereby limiting the court’s capacity to advance accountability in Sudan.
The December 2018 revolution marked the conclusion of three decades of authoritarian governance under the National Congress Party (NCP), a brief opportunity for the democratic transformation of a hybrid transitional government established pursuant to the 2019 Constitutional Declaration, which was formed through a power-sharing agreement between civilian representatives and the military. However, the transition remained structurally fragile and was ultimately derailed by the October 2021 coup led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. This rupture dismantled the civilian-military partnership and intensified competition among armed elites, contributing directly to the outbreak of the war on 15 April 2023.
The belligerents who initiated the conflict have proven unable to end it, as the war has become entangled with the interests of multiple external actors and regional dynamics. Sudan’s transition occurred within a geopolitical context characterized by a general reluctance among states to invest in fragile transitions. This hesitancy deprived the country of the external assurances necessary to manage the competing armed centers of power in the region. Consequently, the conflict has escalated beyond its initial instigators and now poses a threat to the integrity of the Sudanese state, with potential repercussions for the stability of the region.
The Systemic Nature of Violence in Sudan
The absence of accountability for crimes committed in the early 2000s has contributed to a persistent climate of impunity, shaping the dynamics of the current conflict and enabling the recurrence of grave violations in El Geneina, Al Fashir, and Zamzam. More than 20 years after the onset of the Darfur crisis, no convictions have been secured for the atrocities perpetrated against civilian communities. Sudan’s militarized political economy, evolving from the Arab militias locally known as the Janjaweed to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), continues to operate with limited external constraints, reproducing patterns of violence that have disproportionately harmed Black African communities in Darfur, mainly the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit, and many other tribes.
The OTP’s assertion that preliminary examinations are designed to “contribute to the two overarching goals of the Rome Statute: the ending of impunity… and the prevention of crimes” sits uneasily with the reality of the Darfur situation. After nearly two decades of stagnation in preliminary and investigative work, the Darfur file illustrates a profound gap between policy rhetoric and institutional practice. Instead of catalyzing genuine national proceedings or deterring further atrocities, prolonged inaction coincided with, if not indirectly enabled, the continuation and escalation of genocidal violence in Sudan.
This disconnect raises serious questions about whether the current structure of preliminary examinations, marked by open-ended timelines and broad prosecutorial discretion, can meaningfully advance the preventive and accountability goals that the OTP claims to uphold.
The Geographical Expansion of Atrocity Crimes
The atrocities unfolding in Sudan are no longer geographically contained within Darfur; they have expanded outwards, engulfing vast regions of the country with the same brutal logic and tactics that defined earlier waves of violence. What began as targeted campaigns against Black African communities in Darfur has now spread to Khartoum, Omdurman, Gezira, Kordofan, and Blue Nile, replicating the same patterns of mass rape, starvation, forced displacement, and deliberate destruction of civilian life.
The events in Darfur, which targeted the Sudanese population, can be considered a strategic softening of the target in a proxy war aimed at either the total conquest or disintegration of Sudan’s territory. This is exemplified by the parallel government of Taas’is supported by external enablers. The methods are tragically familiar: women are attacked as a weapon of war, entire families are starved through siege tactics, villages are burned, and communities are uprooted in orchestrated campaigns designed to terrorize and erase.
This geographic expansion underscores a critical truth: the violence in Sudan is neither episodic nor localized. It is a systemic, racialized, and militarized project that has metastasized across the country, feeding on the lives and bodies of Sudanese people far beyond Darfur’s borders and is now a part of the national identity.
The Role of External Actors and Resource Financing
The 2023 war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has produced a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented scale, where daily survival is threatened by insecurity, scarcity, and the collapse of essential services. More than 7.2 million people were displaced in the first eight months of the conflict. By late 2025, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) had risen to 9.5 million, with an additional 4.34 million refugees fleeing to neighboring countries. Simultaneously, 30.4 million people, accounting for over two-thirds of Sudan’s population, need humanitarian assistance.
These figures reflect not only the intensity of the conflict but also the systematic targeting of civilians. Massacres have been documented in El Geneina, Nyala, El Fasher, Wad Madani, Omdurman, Bara, Al-Hurga, Wad Al-Noora, and parts of South and West Kordofan. The patterns of violence, including ethnically targeted killings, mass sexual violence, and deliberate starvation, align with the legal definitions of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. However, Sudan’s long history of impunity has enabled the persistence of cycles of violence. Without a credible accountability mechanism, the current atrocities risk becoming another chapter in decades-long patterns of unpunished mass violence.
The referral of the Darfur situation to the ICC through UN Security Council Resolution 1593 (2005) has often been interpreted as the Council transferring responsibility for a highly complex crisis to the Court without providing the political support necessary for its enforcement. Although the ICC issued arrest warrants for senior Sudanese officials, including former President Omar Al-Bashir, the cooperation required from UN member states to execute these warrants was largely absent. As a result, Bashir remained at liberty for years, traveling to states that declined to act on the warrants.
In principle, the ICC could have advanced justice for Darfur’s victims if it had received consistent diplomatic, logistical, and enforcement support. Instead, the Court was left to operate in an international environment where the UN system faces growing constraints and many member states show limited willingness to uphold their obligations under international law.
The Crime of Aggression and International Responsibility
The scale of Sudan’s suffering, from the Darfur genocide beginning in 2003 to the nationwide atrocities of the 2023 war, has never been matched by a meaningful international legal response, particularly regarding the crime of aggression, which remains absent from the ICC’s engagement with Sudan. Any serious discussion of aggression must acknowledge that the violence devastating the country is not driven solely by internal actors but is deeply entangled with the involvement of external states whose political, financial, and logistical support has enabled the escalation of the conflict.
Central to this dynamic is the resource-financing network that sustains the warring parties, especially the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Extensive investigations have shown that the RSF systematically smuggles Sudanese gold through illicit routes into the United Arab Emirates, where it enters both formal and informal markets before being refined, mixed with other sources, and re-exported globally. Once laundered through the UAE’s gold sector, this conflict gold is ultimately supplied to a wide range of international companies, including firms in the automotive, electronics, and luxury goods industries, providing the RSF with steady foreign currency inflows used to procure weapons, recruit fighters, and sustain military operations.
This resource-based financing, combined with the external provision of weapons, logistical assistance, and political backing, has significantly expanded the scale, intensity, and geographic reach of war. By enabling armed groups to convert Sudan’s natural resources into war capital, external involvement has empowered a non-state militia to wage a nationwide campaign marked by mass atrocities, forced displacement, and ethnically targeted violence, all with near-total impunity from the international community’s response.
Without confronting these transnational economic networks, efforts to halt the war and pursue accountability are severely constrained.
The Need for a Special Court for Sudan
The implications of this posture are particularly acute for victims. By circumventing the ICC and resisting mechanisms explicitly designed to address mass atrocity crimes, the government effectively forecloses the principal avenues through which survivors seek justice, recognition, and reparative measures. The crime of aggression, together with its external dimensions, thus remains situated outside any coherent accountability architecture, leaving those most affected without access to the protections and remedies envisaged by international legal frameworks.
This institutional disjuncture not only entrenches impunity but also exacerbates the fragmentation of the international response, allowing grave violations to fall between jurisdictional mandates and systematically leaving victims’ rights unfulfilled in the process.
This omission is not merely technical; it represents a profound gap between the Rome Statute’s legal ideals and their implementation in Africa’s longest-running atrocity landscape. The failure to prosecute aggression has allowed successive governments, militias, and foreign partners to wage war against the Sudanese civilians with impunity. It has normalized the use of state and paramilitary power to target Black African communities and Sudanese people at large, displacing millions and destroying entire regions of the country in the process.
The UN Security Council’s inconsistent engagement, Sudan’s fragmented legal strategy, and the ICC’s limited operational reach have together produced a system in which the structural drivers of violence, including foreign complicity, remain legally unexamined, politically unchallenged, and aggravate the region’s security situation.
This persistent failure underscores the urgent need for a Special Court for Sudan. Such a tribunal would not only address genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes but could also confront the underlying crime of aggression that has fueled decades of conflict. In doing so, it would represent a long-overdue fulfillment of the legal and moral commitments first articulated at Nuremberg: commitments meant to ensure that no population would again be left defenseless in the face of state-driven or foreign-enabled atrocities.
The Path Forward
Sudan’s current crisis exceeds the threshold that previously warranted international intervention through special courts in several ways. The limitations of the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) have become increasingly evident: the crime of aggression has not been investigated despite clear internal and external factors; serious violations against children remain unaddressed; and minimal attention is paid to sexual and gender-based crimes.
The ICC’s persistent difficulty in securing state cooperation for the enforcement of its arrest warrants in Sudan has significantly weakened its accountability efforts, enabling individuals implicated in serious crimes to remain free. These limitations have been further compounded by broader geopolitical dynamics, including inconsistent state cooperation and political pressure, which constrain the Court’s ability to respond effectively.
Collectively, these shortcomings reflect not only institutional constraints within the ICC but also the international community’s failure to uphold its shared responsibility under international criminal law. The existing justice architecture has proven inadequate in addressing the scale and complexity of crimes in Sudan, leaving victims without meaningful avenues for redress and accountability in the country.
In light of these gaps, the establishment of a Special Court for Sudan is both warranted and necessary. Such a mechanism would complement existing institutions and provide a more comprehensive framework capable of addressing the full spectrum of violations experienced by Sudanese victims.
Given the scale and geographic spread of atrocity crimes across Sudan, the UN Security Council must expand its mandate to cover the entire country, enabling the establishment of a special court mechanism with the legitimacy and technical expertise required to address the full spectrum of violations in Sudan. Such a tribunal must possess jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed since April 2023, ensuring that no region or community is excluded from seeking justice for these crimes.
Central to this mandate is the creation of a neutral and independent investigative authority insulated from political interference and capable of examining both state and non-state actors, as well as the provision of highly skilled personnel to address SGBC and child crimes in the country. However, these measures cannot succeed without a comprehensive framework for witness and victim protection, particularly given the scale of sexual violence, forced displacement, and reprisals documented across Sudan.
Effective accountability also requires robust outreach and public engagement, ensuring that affected communities understand and trust the process, as well as sustained coordination with international and regional bodies to support evidence collection, enforcement, and long-term institutional capacity. Only through such an expanded and holistic mandate can a special court meaningfully confront the atrocities in Sudan and restore international justice credibility.
A Just International Order
The Sudanese experience makes it unmistakably clear that power and authority can no longer be invoked to excuse atrocity crimes. The crime of aggression, long recognized as the catalyst that enables genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, has become one of the most destructive forces of this century. Its consequences are evident in the millions of civilians killed by heavy military machinery, the environmental devastation of scorched-earth campaigns, artisanal gold mining using dangerous chemicals, and the systematic use of women’s bodies as instruments of war.
These are not distant abstractions but the daily realities of communities rendered invisible by decades of impunity and neglect.
A just international order cannot rely on selective accountability. Moral justice requires a universal commitment to the safety, dignity, and humanity of the Sudanese people. This commitment forms the ethical foundation of international law: when justice is uneven, institutions lose legitimacy; when it is applied with integrity, it becomes the highest expression of our shared civilization. Therefore, Sudan’s crisis demands more than mere condemnation. It requires a renewed dedication to the principles first articulated at Nuremberg and reconfirmed in the Rome Statute: confronting aggression, protecting the vulnerable, and insisting on accountability so that justice becomes a universal ethic rather than a privilege reserved for a few.
