Wad Madani: Rhino – Over the past few days, Sudanese army forces have carried out a widespread campaign of arrests in Al Jazirah state and a number of other Sudanese cities, targeting supporters of the December revolution, members of resistance committees and emergency rooms, as well as political activists, a number of students and women, displaced persons, and returnees to their areas of origin under army control, in accordance with the law on foreign faces, according to reliable legal and human rights testimonies obtained by Rayno.
In the city of Wad Madani, the authorities are preparing to bring some 850 defendants before mass trials with extremely low standards of justice. Human rights estimates indicate that the number of detainees in Al Jazirah state prisons has exceeded 5,000, while open reports against those suspected of “collaborating with the Rapid Support Forces” have reached about 15,000 in other states.
According to testimonies from victims’ families, the army is holding more than 1,200 civilians in Wad Madani alone, most of them leaders and members of resistance committees, along with other detainees in the city of Al-Hasahisa, under extremely harsh conditions of detention.
Legal advisor Kawthar Mustafa told Raino that the trials have worrying implications for human rights in Sudan, as mass trials of this scale raise questions about the extent to which guarantees of justice are available, from the right of defendants to access lawyers, to the transparency of judicial proceedings, and ending with the possibility of these charges being used as a tool for political revenge or settling scores in the absence of independent oversight.
She added that the army did not stop at targeting activists and revolutionaries but expanded the circle of arrests to include returnees from displacement camps and refugees, many of whom were arrested immediately upon their return to their areas of origin and placed in crowded and inhumane detention centers. According to testimonies, these returnees were subjected to humiliation and psychological and physical torture, including sleep and food deprivation.
