The UN Human Rights Council has passed an unopposed resolution calling on an existing team of independent experts to carry out an urgent inquiry into the killings and other rights violations in the city of el-Fasher by the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary.
This came as the UN’s top human rights body held a one-day special session today, Friday, November 14, 2025, to highlight hundreds of killings at a hospital in Sudan’s Darfur region and other atrocities blamed on paramilitary forces fighting the army in the northeast African country.
The resolution, led by several European countries, offered little in the way of strong new language though it requested a fact-finding team that the council has already created to try to identify those responsible for the crimes in el-Fasher and help bring them to account.
Mona Rishmawi, a member of the team, told the session that much of el-Fasher “now is a crime scene.” She added that since the city fell into the hands of the RSF, her mission has collected “evidence of unspeakable atrocities, deliberate killings, torture, rape, abduction for ransom, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances, all at the mass scale.”
She added that a comprehensive investigation is required to establish the “full picture, but what we already know is devastating.”
The council, which is made up of 47 UN member countries, does not have the power to force countries or others to comply, but can shine a spotlight on rights violations and help document them for possible use in places like the International Criminal Court.
Volker Türk, the UN Human Rights Chief, said that the atrocities that are unfolding in el-Fasher were foreseen and preventable, but they were not prevented. “They constitute the gravest of crimes,” he said.
Türk said that none should be surprised by reports of mass killings of civilians, ethnically targeted executions, sexual violence including gang rape, abductions for ransom, widespread arbitrary detentions, attacks on health facilities, medical staff and humanitarian workers, and other appalling atrocities since the RSF took control of the city.
Last month, the RSF seized el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and rampaged through the Saudi Hospital in the city, killing more than 450 people, according to the World Health Organization.
RSF fighters went house to house, killing civilians and committing sexual assaults, aid workers and displaced residents say.
The military and the RSF, who were former allies, went to war in 2023 and both sides in the conflict have been accused of atrocities.
WHO says that the fighting has killed at least 40,000 people, and the United Nations says another 12 million have been displaced. Aid groups say the true death toll could be many times higher.
An overcrowded displacement camp in the town of al-Dabbah in northern Sudan has seen an influx of new arrivals of people fleeing violence in the Darfur and Kordofan regions.
According to reports, those fleeing Rl-Fasher to safer areas were exposed to beatings, searched, and robbed on the way by armed men. They also face severe hunger and dehydration.
Sudanese Army Condemned
The United Arab Emirates Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Jamal al-Musharakh, condemned the RSF over attacks on civilians in el-Fasher, but also accused the Sudanese military, the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, of carrying out indiscriminate attacks on civilians and ignoring international calls for a truce.
Al-Musharakh said during the UN session, “This is nothing new,” adding that the SAF “has harbored terrorists and sheltered individuals indicted for genocide.”
The UAE is part of a US-led mediator group known as the Quad, which proposed a humanitarian truce in September that the RSF agreed to earlier this month.
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