The Long Road to Justice for Sexual War Crimes – Foreign Policy
April 10, 2025
Since April 2023, Sudan’s army has been battling the Rapid Support Forces, which was once its own paramilitary fighting wing, for control of the country. The violence has killed up to 150,000 people by some estimates, injured tens of thousands more, and displaced more than 14 million Sudanese both within and beyond the country. And in the midst of the fighting, perpetrators from both sides of the conflict have been engaged in systemic acts of sexual violence that the head of a United Nations fact-finding mission recently described as “staggering” in scale, likely amounting to a war crime and a crime against humanity.
However, the impediments to investigating rape during conflict are significant, and they can obstruct successful prosecutions in both local and international courts. For most survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan, justice remains elusive.