The UAE said it would seek immediate dismissal of the case, which it said lacked “any legal or factual basis,” a UAE official said in a statement to Reuters.
The charges are in connection with intense ethnic-based attacks by the RSF and allied Arab groups against the non-Arab Masalit tribe in 2023 in West Darfur, documented in detail by Reuters. Those attacks were determined to be genocide by the United States in January.
The Sudanese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to comment. Reuters has seen a copy of the government’s application.
Sudanese officials have frequently accused the UAE of supporting the RSF, the government’s rivals in an almost two-year-old civil war, charges the UAE denies but UN experts and U.S. lawmakers have found credible.
At the ICJ, Sudan alleges the RSF committed “genocide, murder, theft of property, rape, forcible displacement, trespassing, vandalism of public properties, and violation ofhuman rights,” according to a statement by the ICJ, also knownas the World Court.
“According to Sudan, all such acts have been ‘perpetrated and enabled by the direct support given to the rebel RSF group and related groups by the United Arab Emirates,'” it said.
The UAE official said: “The UAE is aware of the recent application by the Sudanese Armed Force’s representative to the International Court of Justice, which is nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt aimed at diverting attention from the established complicity of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the widespread atrocities that continue to devastate Sudan and its people.”
The war between the Sudanese army and the RSF, which erupted after a power struggle over integrating the forces in April 2023, has devastated the country, spreading hunger and disease while risking its fragmentation, and has drawn in several foreign powers.
It has sparked ethnic attacks in multiple areas, but the bloodiest were in West Darfur, where survivors told Reuters thatMasalit were targeted for killing while young women weretargeted for rapes over waves of attacks soon after the war began.
The ICJ is the UN’s highest court that deals with disputes between states and violations of international treaties. Sudan and the UAE are both signatories of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Sudan is asking the court to impose emergency measures and to order the Emirates to prevent such genocidal acts.
While a hearing on the emergency measures should come before the ICJ within weeks, it will take years before the court will issue a final ruling which could determine if a genocide had been committed in Darfur.
The RSF and allied political groups are in the process of setting up a parallel government to the army-aligned one which has taken Port Sudan on the Red Sea, a move rejected by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
--Reuters--
