Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what steps he is taking to help ensure that (a) parties to and (b) foreign backers of the conflict in Sudan (i) comply with international humanitarian law and (ii) are held accountable for violations.

In response to the brutal conflict in Sudan the UK is doing all it can to strengthen adherence to international humanitarian law (IHL), to promote accountability for violations and to improve the protection context for civilians. The UK is using its position as penholder at the UN Security Council and leader of the core group on Sudan at the Human Rights Council to keep a spotlight on, and take actions in response to, the human rights situation in Sudan. To bolster our monitoring capacity we are funding the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) who are leading efforts to gather open-source evidence about attacks against civilians and infrastructure as well as leading work to monitor hate speech and incitement of violence across the country. We are also providing support to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to enable their human rights monitoring and reporting, and in October, led the renewal of the UN Fact Finding Mission for Sudan's mandate as part of the Sudan 'Core Group' in the Human Rights Council. These are vital mechanisms to ensure that evidence of human rights violations and abuses are collected, preserved, and can be used to hold perpetrators to account.  The UK also strongly supports the International Criminal Court's active investigation into the situation in Darfur, including allegations of crimes committed since April 2023.