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“As hostilities have expanded in reach and intensity over the past year, the lives and hopes of so many Sudanese have been uprooted and caught in a mire of death, deprivation and suffering,” said UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani.
“Two years of this brutal and senseless conflict must be a wake-up call to the parties to lay down their weapons and for the international community to act,” she told reporters at the UN biweekly press briefing in Geneva.
Shamdasani explained that the conflict in Sudan is not merely a power struggle, but is significantly influenced by economic and business interests of national and international actors, in key sectors such as gold and agricultural commodities.
She added that the Proliferation of arms and continued weapons supplies, including to the western Darfur region, where a UN Security Council arms embargo is in place, are compounding the fighting, enabling violations of international law and undermining peace efforts. “All those involved in facilitating the transfer of arms and military material to Darfur must stop, in compliance with the embargo. We call, again, for the arms embargo to be expanded to cover the whole of Sudan.”
The conflict, between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, has been marked by complete disregard for the laws of war and for international human rights law from the outset, with the parties regularly attacking populated areas and critical civilian infrastructure, such as healthcare facilities, water stations and power plants, perpetrating serious human rights violations and abuses, and obstructing humanitarian aid, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement.
Joining from Nairobi, UN Human Rights head of the Sudan office Li Fung said there were “growing concerns about the hostilities escalating and expanding to new areas, including in Kordofan, Blue Nile and Northern State, and the devastating impact for the civilian population who have already endured two years of conflict”.
“Retaliatory attacks and summary killings of people suspected of collaborating with opposing forces remain a serious concern,” Fung told the reporters. “Such attacks – which are often ethnically-motivated – have continued unabated, fanned by hate speech and incitement to violence, particularly on social media.”
She said her team travelled recently to to eastern Chad and gathered over 160 testimonies from men, women, boys and girls who had fled conflict and violence in North and West Darfur. “Victims and witnesses recounted to us ethnically targeted attacks by the RSF on villages in North and West Darfur, based on the ethnicity of the inhabitants, and extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, arbitrary detention and torture.”
“The accounts of sexual violence – and patterns of rape and gang rape – were particularly horrific,” Fung said. “Numerous survivors of violence in West Darfur in 2023 had only been able to flee recently, as they had been held by the RSF in conditions amounting to sexual slavery.”
ENDS
For more information and media requests, please contact:
Ravina Shamdasani: +41 22 917 9169 / ravina.shamdasani@un.org
Thameen Al-Kheetan: +41 22 917 4232 / thameen.alkheetan@un.org
Seif Magango: +41 79 752 0488 / seif.magango@un.org
Tag and share – Twitter: @UNHumanRights and Facebook: unitednationshumanrights
STORY: UN Human Rights Spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani, and UN Human Rights head of Sudan office Li Fung on the consequences of the ongoing conflict
TRT: 02:40
SOURCE: OHCHR
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: English/NATS
ASPECT RATIO: 16:9
DATELINE: 11 April 2025 – GENEVA, SWITZERLAND AND NAIROBI, KENYA
SHOTLIST
- Exterior shot : Palais des Nations
- Interior shot: Briefing room
- SOUNDBITE (English)—Ravina Shamdasani, Spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): “Warring parties in Sudan are overseeing a wholesale assault on human rights amid global inaction. As hostilities have expanded in reach and intensity over the past year, the lives and hopes of so many Sudanese have been uprooted and caught in a mire of death, deprivation and suffering.”
- Cutaway: Briefing room
- SOUNDBITE (English)—Ravina Shamdasani, Spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): “Two years of this brutal and senseless conflict must be a wake-up call to the parties to lay down their weapons and for the international community to act.”
- Cutaway: Briefing room
- SOUNDBITE (English)—Ravina Shamdasani, Spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): “Proliferation of arms and continued weapons supplies, including to the western Darfur region, where a UN Security Council arms embargo is in place, are also compounding the fighting, enabling violations of international law and undermining peace efforts. Allthose involved in facilitating the transfer of arms and military material to Darfur must stop, in compliance with the embargo. We call, again, for the arms embargo to be expanded to cover the whole of Sudan.”
- Cutaway: Briefing room
- SOUNDBITE (English)—Li Fung, Head of the Sudan office for at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): “There are also growing concerns about the hostilities escalating and expanding to new areas, including in Kordofan, Blue Nile and Northern State, and the devastating impact for the civilian population who have already endured two years of conflict.”
- Cutaways: Briefing room
- SOUNDBITE (English)—Li Fung, Head of the Sudan office for at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): “Retaliatory attacks and summary killings of people suspected of collaborating with opposing forces remain a serious concern. Such attacks – which are often ethnically-motivated – have continued unabated, fanned by hate speech and incitement to violence, particularly on social media.”
- Cutaways: Briefing room
- SOUNDBITE (English)—Li Fung, Head of the Sudan office for at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): “Victims and witnesses recounted to us ethnically targeted attacks by the RSF on villages in North and West Darfur, based on the ethnicity of the inhabitants, and extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, arbitrary detention and torture.”
- Cutaways: Briefing room
- SOUNDBITE (English)—Li Fung, Head of the Sudan office for at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): “The accounts of sexual violence – and patterns of rape and gang rape – were particularly horrific. Numerous survivors of violence in West Darfur in 2023 had only been able to flee recently, as they had been held by the RSF in conditions amounting to sexual slavery.”
- Cutaways: Briefing room
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The key findings from WMO’s State of Global Water Resources 2025 report covering the hydrological cycle and extreme events in the five-year period to last year:
- 2025 was one of driest years for river discharge in 35 years
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- Water storage on Earth’s land surface has decreased in past decade
- Widespread glacier loss across all regions for fourth consecutive year
- Asia and Africa are regions most affected by water-related disasters
- Water data availability has improved, but gaps remain in hard-hit areas
Highlighting the long-term decline in the Earth’s freshwater storage and glacier melt, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo explained that the planet’s water reserves used to act as a planetary “savings account” that absorbed the occasional dry season, avoiding a water crisis. “One of the central stories of the 2025 report is what is happening to that savings account? And the simple answer is that we are depleting it,” she told journalists in Geneva.
Groundwater reserves are equally stretched and have been in decline since 2014, WMO’s report states, with nearly two-thirds of monitored wells worldwide showing levels lower than the historical norm and indicating a shift “further toward deficit…not recovery”.
“At the same time, we are seeing more water-related disasters,” Ms. Saulo said, while also stressing that the currently strengthening El Niño “will increase the risk of drought in some areas, and flooding in others”.
Glaciers disappearing
In 2025, for the fourth consecutive year, every major glaciated region on Earth lost ice mass, leading to short-term hazards including floods and long-term water insecurity, according to WMO.
Responding to a question about whether the changing global water cycle might have contributed to the deadly Nepal-China flooding disaster, Ms. Saulo explained that melting ice and rock was just one factor in the chain of events that ultimately sent a massive and deadly wall of water and debris downstream on 26 August, killing at least 1,367 people.
“You asked if it could happen again? Absolutely; the problem in this region is that there’s 63,700 glaciers at the last count,” she told a Press Conference in Geneva. “Even if you’re looking with remote sensing with satellites at these glaciers, you might see some faults, you might see some slight shifting, that does not mean necessarily catastrophic collapse. So, in order to plan for this, it’s very, very difficult. But the international community is looking very hard at ways in which we can bring people together to solve some of these monitoring issues.”
Data indicates that glaciers shrank between 2023 and 2025 with cumulative losses of 1,400 gigatonnes of water – or about one third of annual fresh water needs.
Every major glacier region on Earth lost ice for the fourth consecutive year.
“All 19 glacier regions around the globe lost ice; in Central Asia, Iceland, the Russian Arctic and western Canada and the United States, it was among the three worst years on record,” said Wayne Jenkinson, WMO’s Director of Hydrology and Cryosphere.
Some regions with smaller glaciers such as Central Europe, the Caucasus, the western Canada and the United States may already have reached “peak water”, Mr. Jenkinson warned.
“After this point, the glacier gives less meltwater each year simply because there is less ice left to melt. That matters for every community downstream that relies on water during hot, dry summers,” he explained.
Narelle van der Wel, WMO’s Head of Cryosphere Monitoring, Predictions and Services, stressed that while some further glacier loss is unavoidable, the eventual scale of the decline is not predetermined.
“Some glacier loss is inevitable, but total loss of glaciers is not yet inevitable,” she said, pointing to emissions reductions as central to limiting future losses.
Preparing for moving baselines
The report does not attribute every observed change to climate change alone. WMO says pressure on water resources and natural variability also contribute.
Mr. Jenkinson said governments need to prepare for “moving baselines” as historical patterns become less reliable.
“The situation 30 years ago is not where we are today,” he said. Countries, he added, need to prepare “for those changes that have really already arrived”.
ends