Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), acting without lawful authority, arbitrarily detained dozens of civilians, including political activists, in the capital, Khartoum during 2020, Human Rights Watch said today.
The detainees were held incommunicado or in circumstances constituting enforced disappearances. The authorities should take urgent steps to ensure that the RSF stops acting outside the law, and that all civilian detainees are immediately released.
“Sudan’s transitional government should rein in the Rapid Support Forces, which is assuming ever increasing power without any legal basis,” said Laetitia Bader, Horn of Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “It is completely unacceptable for military forces to hold civilians in custody instead of handing them over to civilian authorities or releasing them if that is not possible.”
Human Rights Watch documented multiple unlawful detentions of civilians in 2020 in Khartoum by the Rapid Support Forces, which has been responsible for serious abuses against civilians in Darfur and other conflict zones. Between September 2020 and February 2021, Human Rights Watch interviewed four former detainees, two family members, and a lawyer in cases in which the RSF had unlawfully held civilians.
The former detainees said that the security forces held them incommunicado and denied them access to lawyers and their families throughout their detention, which ranged from a week to over a month. Two detainees said RSF guards physically ill-treated them.
Human Rights Watch said that authorities should credibly investigate reported arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detentions, enforced disappearances, and other abuse in custody, including the death of one detainee, Human Rights Watch said. If warranted, civilian authorities can pursue any credible evidence of criminal wrongdoing by former detainees in accordance with the law.
Under Sudan’s transitional constitutional charter, the RSF has been designated a regular military force. The force led the violent crackdown on protesters on June 3, 2019 in Khartoum neighborhoods and neighboring Bahri and Omdurman, which left at least 120 people dead and hundreds injured. The transitional government has continued to use RSF officers in crowd control and law enforcement operations.
HRW said Sudan’s armed forces, including the RSF, do not have legal authority to detain civilians or carry out law enforcement functions, thus making detentions of civilians illegal, Human Rights Watch said. Following the death, while in RSF custody, of 45-year-old Baha al-Din Nouri in Khartoum in December, the attorney general on January 21, 2021 issued an instruction explicitly limiting the powers of arrest and detention of civilians to the police and prosecutors, making clear that any detention by other forces is considered unlawful. Human Rights Watch was unable to confirm what, if any, steps the attorney general has taken to ensure the terms of the instruction are enforced, such as inspecting unlawful detention sites.
Mohamed Nouri, Baha al-Din Nouri’s brother, told Human Rights Watch that witnesses saw him being abducted by armed men in civilian clothes in southern Khartoum on December 16. Five days later, the family received a call informing them that Baha al-Din had died and that his body was at a hospital morgue in Omdurman. “Another relative went to the morgue and saw visible bruises on Baha al-Din’s body,” his brother said. “The morgue director pressured us to accept the body and his autopsy report suggesting that Nouri died due to sickness, but we refused.”
On December 27, forensic examiners conducted a second autopsy on instructions from the attorney general. The second autopsy report documented injuries, including brain hemorrhage caused by impact with a blunt object, that are consistent with beatings and that led to Baha al-Din Nouri’s death. On the same day, the RSF in a statement admitted that Baha al-Din had died in RSF intelligence custo