Displaced residents build temporary shelters in Tawila, North Darfur. Photo: Mohamed Elgoni/UNOCHA via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

A growing number of international bodies have documented evidence of alleged atrocities in Sudan’s protracted civil war. In July, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said the court has amassed ‘concrete evidence’ linking senior commanders of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

The civil war erupted in 2023 soon after army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — known as Hemedti — who were jointly leading Sudan at the time, fell out, causing the RSF to splinter off. The war quickly expanded across regions drawing in external actors. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says the conflict between the armed forces and the RSF has displaced more than 12 million people, with famine conditions in various locations and ‘an epidemic of sexual violence’.

Amnesty International issued a detailed report in July alleging that forces belonging to Hemedti, have orchestrated ethnic cleansing in their brutal campaign to capture El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and its surrounding areas. The 208-page report titled ‘City Under Siege, Children Under Fire’ based on 247 interviews, including 39 children, says the RSF actively used rape and sexual slavery and deliberately destroyed homes and infrastructure so residents could never return.

These findings reinforced those from other bodies earlier this year. In April, the African Union’s human rights commission and UN investigators warned of atrocity crimes. In February, Human Rights Watch reported RSF fighters targeted civilians with disabilities during the El-Fasher siege, while the UN Fact-Finding Mission found the campaign bore the ‘hallmarks of genocide. Despite the mounting body of evidence, the investigations also highlight considerable barriers to prosecuting non-state actors and delivering justice for victims.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights separately found that the October 2025 assault killed more than 6,000 people through mass summary executions that could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Together the reports describe an 18-month siege that weakened the population through starvation, deprivation, trauma and confinement. Kristin Smith is an officer of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee. ‘Some of the patterns that stood out to me,’ she says, ‘are things like destroying villages and homes to prevent civilians from returning, the pervasive use of sexual violence to terrorise civilians, restricting food and other aid, which, to use legal terms, can create conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction and killing civilians who are just trying to flee or are at protected sites like hospitals.’

Investigators for Amnesty’s recent high-profile report conclude that tactics by Hemedti’s militias created life-threatening conditions amounting to extermination and forced transfer. The report also highlights the routine use of derogatory, dehumanising language by fighters during assaults. Smith says those practices constitute evidence of persecution and that it remains 'very relevant to considering whether there’s genocidal intent, which is notoriously difficult to prove.'

Most of the other recent international reports were pieced together from harrowing survivor testimony, satellite surveillance and open-source video and they lay bare plans for slaughter that stretched from early 2024 through the RSF’s final, bloody conquest of El-Fasher and its surrounding areas, coveted for their sizeable gold reserves, in late October 2025.

In a statement posted on an RSF-affiliated Telegram channel, the group appeared to deny the accusations saying, ‘The RSF are deeply committed to protecting civilians in liberated areas, ensuring their safety and preserving their possessions as well'.

Despite investigators documenting crimes and identifying alleged perpetrators there have so far been no arrests, trials or judgments. ‘Even if you have everything else, you know who committed the crime, you have the evidence, you still have to get custody,’ says Jonathan Hafetz, Treasurer of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee. ‘But these investigative mechanisms are important in laying the foundation for prosecutions.’

Amnesty International identifies several commanders allegedly linked to serious abuses. Smith says such findings will eventually lead to justice if supported by states. 'Documentation and accountability mechanisms are a medium and long-term investment and need to be viewed that way by states and other donors in order to be effective,' she says, before adding, ‘there are significant obstacles in pursuing justice for atrocity crimes generally that are relevant to the situation in Sudan.'

On the ground investigators are locked out of conflict zones and government forces shield fugitives like ousted former President Omar Al-Bashir. Chronic funding cuts also hamper the NGOs tasked with safeguarding witness trust and physical evidence. The passage of time decays critical testimony, making prosecutions increasingly fragile.

Hafetz says that independent investigations provide the essential bridge between battlefield atrocities and individual criminal liability. 'Investigative mechanisms are important for preserving evidence, identifying perpetrators and command structures, documenting patterns of criminality and locating witnesses, especially before evidence disappears,' he says.

The ICC’s mandate in Sudan remains significantly constrained by a decades-old Security Council resolution. ‘The ICC is investigating crimes committed both in the current conflict and in prior conflicts, but its reach is limited,’ says Smith. ‘Although the office of the prosecutor has asked the Security Council to extend its mandate to cover crimes across the country, it currently only has jurisdiction over crimes committed in Darfur because Sudan is not a state party to the Rome Statute and the ICC instead got jurisdiction years ago through a previous Security Council resolution.’

Now that Sudan is gaining greater international attention, Smith sees potential for easing obstacles to legal accountability. ‘It’s important to remember that obligations to prevent genocide apply to all states,’ she says. ‘The International Court of Justice [ICJ] has previously said that even third-party states must use all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide so far as possible.’

Encouraged by recent rulings on civil war abuses by Syrian officials, experts expect the same principle of 'universal jurisdiction' to be deployed in relation to Sudan. When international or domestic tribunals are unable to act, countries can prosecute grave crimes committed abroad. ‘Universal jurisdiction is one of the strongest avenues,’ says Hafetz. ‘Universal jurisdiction isn’t a replacement for international courts, or for the ICJ or ICC, but it is an important complementary mechanism that can help at least narrow the impunity gap.’

The conflict in Sudan, a country of nearly 52 million people, has been worsened by outside intervention. Smith says that accountability must extend beyond the battlefield to the financial and political networks, local or international, that sustain the RSF war machine. Legal challenges to arms sales and other economic activities enabling atrocities could establish accountability, support reparations and disrupt the networks sustaining the RSF. ‘As a practical matter,’ says Smith, ‘highlighting these relationships can increase pressure to cut off resources for warring parties like the RSF, which has an extensive business network.’

Emad Mekay is a freelance journalist and can be contacted at emad.mekay@int-bar.org

Artificial intelligence is already transforming the financial sector, from automating customer services roles to assisting with fraud detection. While the technology offers opportunities for efficiency and growth, it raises urgent questions for regulators and businesses about governance and the mitigation of risks.

The UK has decided to take a hands-off approach when it comes to regulating the use of AI in financial services. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has decided to rely on its existing frameworks, including the Consumer Duty and the Senior Managers and Certification Regime. These aim to strengthen market integrity and hold businesses and their individual leaders accountable for harms to customers.

Subhajit Basu, professor of Law and Technology at the University of Leeds, says that in principle the UK regulator’s approach is defensible because most of the potential harms of AI – discrimination, exclusion and mis-selling – aren’t new. The difficulty is the lack of guidance the FCA has provided about how existing rules apply. ‘The interpretive work has been pushed onto firms, and firms have said fairly consistently they can’t do it with confidence,’ he says. ‘You have the odd spectacle of industry asking for more regulatory specificity and the regulator declining’.

That said, Basu believes additional regulation is necessary because existing laws have failed to prevent the harms that algorithmic systems have already produced. ‘The Post Office Horizon scandal is the case everyone in this country now understands, and its lesson is about what happens when a system's outputs can't be effectively contested and there are no tamper-proof records to analyse’.

Matt Hancock is a partner and member of the Litigation Practice at Greenberg Traurig in London. He says there is a ‘huge risk’ of AI resulting in increased regulatory issues for businesses stemming from misleading financial advice and exposure to financial crime. ‘My general sense is that it will be something that forms a significant part of our caseload in years to come,’ he says. Hancock also expects AI to increasingly feature in the day-to-day supervisory interactions between the FCA and businesses with the regulator likely to require an explanation of exactly how AI was used and its sufficiency for the task.

Hancock says that in the short term it would be helpful for the FCA to release guidance for companies on how existing rules apply and look to introducing new regulation in the long term once the risks are more fully understood. ‘I think the FCA recognises that, if it tries to regulate something today, by the time they actually do, it’ll be a year at least,’ he says. ‘In the context of AI, a year is a very long time in terms of how and where the tech is evolving.’

Josh Hogan is an officer of the IBA Banking and Financial Law Committee and a partner at McCann FitzGerald in Dublin. He says the main challenge for multinational businesses is responding to the different regulatory approaches to AI in the UK, EU and US. The EU introduced the AI Act in 2024. The legislation includes a risk-based system that treats some of the most common use cases for AI in financial services – such as credit scoring – as a high-risk activity. ‘The big challenge is going to be the distillation of the core principles and standards, building that within institutions and then fine-tuning for the local legal and regulatory requirements of each jurisdiction where the institutions are operating,’ he says.

In July, the AI Omnibus entered into force across the EU. The regulation delayed the implementation of some rules in the AI Act related to high-risk systems, including the evaluation of creditworthiness, until December 2027. The EU said changes to the original legislation were necessary to support innovation and allow companies an extended timeline to test AI systems and achieve compliance.

The Central Bank of Ireland’s approach to AI regulation is based on four core principles: strategic alignment, accountability, explainability and proportionate governance. Hogan says these safeguards are essential to ensure AI outputs are properly stress tested. ‘It is not enough to have somebody essentially rubber-stamping decisions made by AI. They need to be able to properly test it and that means keeping the human ability to actually do the task that AI is doing.’

Basu is clear that tech companies must be held accountable on claims they can improve financial services for customers and the detection of financial crime. ‘The promise that AI makes our lives better remains marketing rhetoric until we have robust evidence of how much these systems actually serve people in specific contexts, and at what cost,’ he says. ‘Regulation in the public interest insists on real-world evidence not just about benefits, but about the nature, extent and distribution of adverse impacts.’

Basu says governments should ground AI regulation in international human rights frameworks rather than a set of aspirations decided by the tech industry. This includes ensuring that people whose legal rights or significant interests are adversely affected by AI decision-making can contest the output and access redress. Businesses should also be required to keep records and logs of their AI use to make meaningful human oversight possible. ‘And it means recognising that where even the developers can't explain why a black-box system produced a given output, that opacity is a fundamental limit on how far the system can be trusted.’

Header image: Dan Talson/Adobe Stock