Three years ago this April, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces turned a country of 48 million people into an arena of competing atrocity. What began as a power struggle between two military factions has become, in the words of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission reporting in February 2026, a conflict bearing the “hallmarks of genocide” in El Fasher. The international community has had three years to act with urgency. It has instead acted with language.

The RSF’s siege and capture of El Fasher was a study in deliberate cruelty. Daily bombardments compressed the civilian population into a shrinking area. Humanitarian access was strangled. People, including children, were reduced to surviving on animal fodder. When the RSF completed its takeover, it massacred civilians and unarmed fighters attempting to flee, committed widespread sexual violence against women and girls, and took hostages from whose families it demanded ransom. This was not the chaos of war. It was its design.

The crisis has now migrated. Kordofan and Blue Nile States have become the new epicentre of conflict. Cities are under siege. Civilians cannot access humanitarian aid or basic services. They cannot flee safely. The RSF is advancing on El Obeid. The Joint Fact-Finding Mission of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, reporting in October 2025, described what is happening as massive and systematic. The Sudan Core Group at the UN Human Rights Council, comprising Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom, has announced a coalition on atrocity prevention. Coalitions, unfortunately, do not feed the besieged.

“The EU response remains at odds with the gravity of the crisis and the atrocities committed on civilians by the warring parties.”

A coalition of major rights organisations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Front Line Defenders, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, and the International Federation for Human Rights, has written to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen ahead of the April 15th Berlin Ministerial Conference on Sudan. Their demands are extensive, specific, and, to anyone familiar with how international conferences on African conflicts typically conclude, dispiriting in how predictably they are likely to be only partially addressed.

The groups call on the EU to operationalise its stated commitment to the protection of civilians by joining the atrocity prevention coalition and using all instruments at its disposal. They want the arms embargo currently confined to Darfur expanded to all of Sudan, and they want states that have already violated it, most pointedly the United Arab Emirates, held accountable. They want the International Criminal Court adequately resourced and its jurisdiction extended to cover international crimes committed across Sudan, not merely in Darfur. They want emergency humanitarian funding increased and sexual violence placed at the centre, not the margins, of conference agendas.

The EU’s Foreign Affairs Council Conclusions of October 2025 contained admirable language about the protection of civilians, rule of law, and accountability. Rights groups acknowledge the language. They note that it has not been matched by action proportionate to the scale of what is happening. Berlin on April 15th is a rare alignment of occasion and urgency. Whether European governments use it to deliver consequences or merely restate commitments will be the measure of whether three years of watching has taught them anything at all.

Sources: Joint Letter to President von der Leyen from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Front Line Defenders, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, and FIDH, April 2026. UN Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan, February 2026. African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights Joint FFM, October 2025. EU Foreign Affairs Council Conclusions, October 2025. European Parliament resolution, November 2025. African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies and Sudan Human Rights Monitor, Memorandum to the Sudan Conference, Berlin, 7 April 2026