Sudan has filed a case against the United Arab Emirates at the World Court, alleging that it violated its Genocide Convention commitments by arming paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, according to the International Court of Justice.
The UAE said it will seek prompt dismissal of the case, which it claimed lacked “any legal or factual basis,” according to a UAE official.
The charges stem from the RSF and allied Arab militias’ violent ethnic-based attacks against the non-Arab Masalit tribe in West Darfur in 2023, which have been well documented.
The United States declared such attacks genocide in January.
Sudanese officials have regularly accused the UAE of helping the RSF, the government’s adversaries in a nearly two-year civil war, which the UAE rejects but UN experts and US politicians believe are genuine.
At the ICJ, Sudan alleges the RSF committed “genocide, murder, theft of property, rape, forcible displacement, trespassing, vandalism of public properties, and violation of human rights,” according to a statement by the ICJ, also known as the World Court.
According to Sudan, all such acts have been “perpetrated and enabled by the direct support given to the rebel RSF militia and related militia groups by the United Arab Emirates,” it said.
The UAE official said: “The UAE is aware of the recent application by the Sudanese Armed Force’s representative to the International Court of Justice, which is nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt aimed at diverting attention from the established complicity of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the widespread atrocities that continue to devastate Sudan and its people.”
The war between the Sudanese army and the RSF, which erupted after a power struggle over integrating the forces in April 2023, has devastated the country, spreading hunger and disease while risking its fragmentation, and has drawn in several foreign powers.
It has sparked ethnic attacks in multiple areas, but the bloodiest were in West Darfur, where survivors told newsmen that Masalit boys were targeted for killing while young women were targeted for rapes over waves of attacks soon after the war began.
ICJ is the UN.’s highest court that deals with disputes between states and violations of international treaties. Sudan and the UAE are both signatories of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Sudan is requesting that the court impose emergency measures and force the Emirates to avoid such heinous activities.
While a hearing on emergency measures should be held before the ICJ within weeks, it will take years for the court to issue a final verdict on whether or not a genocide occurred in Sudan.
The RSF and other political groups are forming an alternative administration to the army-aligned one that has taken over Port Sudan on the Red Sea, a move that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have all opposed.
