Sudan has told the UN’s top court that the United Arab Emirates is breaching the genocide convention by arming and funding the rebel paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces, in a case vigorously contested by the UAE.
The north-east African country is asking the International Court of Justice to issue emergency orders, known as provisional measures, including telling the UAE to do all it can to prevent the killing and other crimes targeting the Masalit people during Sudan’s two-year civil war.
“The genocide against the Masalit is being carried out by the Rapid Support Force, believed to be Arab from Darfur, with the support and complicity of the United Arab Emirates,” acting justice minister Muawia Osman said in his opening statements at The Hague-based court.
The UAE has repeatedly dismissed the filing of the case as a political game and has argued the ICJ has no legal power to hear Sudan’s claim and asked judges to throw out the case.
“It is clear beyond doubt that there is no jurisdiction. We therefore call upon the court to remove the case from the general list,” Reem Ketait, a top official at the UAE foreign affairs ministry, told the court.
Both Sudan and the UAE are signatories to the 1948 genocide convention.
The United Arab Emirates, however, has a caveat to part of the treaty that legal experts say makes it unlikely that the case will proceed.
“The ICJ has previously said that this kind of reservation is allowed and is a barrier to a case going forward. The court is most likely to say the same thing in this case, meaning that this case will not go forward,” said Melanie O’Brien, an associate professor of international law at the University of Western Australia and an expert on the Genocide Convention.
Sudan descended into a deadly conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary rebels broke out in the capital, Khartoum, and spread to other regions.
Both the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces have been accused of abuses.
The UAE, a federation of seven sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula, and a US ally, has been repeatedly accused of arming the RSF, something it has strenuously denied despite evidence to the contrary.
Conflict Observatory, a monitoring group funded by the US state department that has been monitoring the war in Sudan, has identified aircraft it says carried UAE arms transfers to the RSF.
Those flights went through Marechal Idriss Deby international airport in Amdjarass, Chad.
The UAE says the purpose of the flights was to support a local hospital.
In January, the US Treasury department announced that RSF leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa, also known as Hemedti, had been targeted for sanctions along with seven RSF-owned companies in the United Arab Emirates, including one handling gold likely smuggled out of Sudan.
That came as the US declared the RSF rebels were committing genocide.
The war has killed more than 24,000 people and driven over 14 million − about 30 per cent of the population — from their homes, according to the United Nations.
An estimated 3.2 million Sudanese have escaped to neighbouring countries.
The Sudanese Armed Forces have broadly retaken Khartoum from the RSF. Last month, the military said it had recaptured Khartoum’s international airport. − AP/Reuters
