Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, what steps he is taking to support human rights and civilian protection monitoring in Sudan following the ending of the UNITAMS mandate on 3 December 2023; and what assessment he has made of the adequacy of resources allocated for those purposes by the (a) Sudan office of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and (b) Sudan Fact-Finding Mission established by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The UK continues to fund and support the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Sudan in monitoring and reporting on human rights violations. This financial year, the UK has also provided £600,000 to the Centre for Information Resilience's Sudan's Witness Project, which is investigating attacks against civilians. Despite the recent termination of The United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan's (UNITAM) mandate following the removal of host state consent, the UK will continue to use its position as penholder at the UN Security Council to call out human rights abuses and we have worked closely with Council members and Sudan to retain a 120-day briefing cycle. In October, the UN Human Rights Council adopted the UK-led 'Sudan Core Group' (US, Norway, Germany, UK) resolution to establish an independent Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) for Sudan which, once operational, will comprise 18 staff plus three experts.