SHRO: Grave Concerns over Women and Children Status in Sudan

THE SUDAN HUAMN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION – CAIRO

March 8, 2011 — In the International Women’s Day, a vast majority of the women, children, and displaced families in Sudan continue to suffer severe living conditions under the ongoing crises of displacement and destitution, especially in Darfur and the shanty towns of the National Capital Khartoum, in addition to unabated violations of the constitutional rights of female professionals and democracy activists by many government authorities. Most importantly, the situation of the displaced women and their families in Darfur has never been improved since the early 2000s. Still forced to live under dehumanizing conditions in the remote camps of displacement, the social, economic, and political suffering of the Darfuri displaced population has been deliberately normalized by the Government of Sudan for political reason.

The Women’s Day in Sudan is a day of great suffering in the light of the worsening standards of living, including rising inflation and levels of unemployment, besides disappearing support for the needy population. Worst of all, the government’s security departments continued to exercise tortures as well as rapes in reported cases against women arbitrarily arrested, detained, or sentenced with whipping and other degrading punishments to the human dignity. A whole generation of the Darfuris displaced children has been deprived of the least rights guaranteed by the International Agreement on Children’s Rights of which Sudan is Party, as well as the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women that the government never ratified.

SHRO-Cairo calls on the Government of Sudan, the sole top responsible entity for these situations, to take immediate measures to return the Darfuri women and families to their Homelands before further administrative steps might be enforced upon the region, as currently planned by authorities. Recently, armed conflicts erupted between citizens in Abyei with serious casualties among women and children, thus adding more innocent victims to the displaced population. In Khartoum and other cities, the Sudan Police and Security Department applied harsh measures by the Public Order Law to curtail the right of women to assemble peacefully in protest of unlawful detention of activist family members. Related to this, the Organization asks the authorities to release the detained journalists, students, and human rights activists who have been arbitrarily arrested for human rights’ activities.

We call on the authorities to put a final end to all these violations; move to trial the accused agents; and abrogate the notorious laws that made it possible for the police and courts to brutalize the women of Sudan and their innocent families.