Amsterdam — The growing number of harsh sentences handed down to women by courts during Sudan's war, including death sentences*, represents a profound failure of justice, according to Hala Al-Karib, regional director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA), told Radio Dabanga

Al-Karib said imposing death sentences and other severe punishments without taking account of women's living conditions, economic circumstances, and the increasingly coercive realities of life during the conflict was fundamentally incompatible with the principles of justice.

Speaking to Radio Dabanga, she said women were being unfairly accused of collaborating with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) simply because they had remained with their families in areas later controlled by the paramilitary group.

Follow us on WhatsApp | LinkedIn for the latest headlines

Their presence in those areas was not a matter of free choice, she said, but the result of war, poverty, coercion, and fear. The rising cost of travel and prohibitively high rents in safer areas had also left many families, and the women within them, with little option but to remain where they were.

Hala Al-Karib said there was little reliable information about what was happening to women in areas under RSF control, describing them as a "deep well" into which there was little visibility.

"But I expect the violations suffered by women there to be beyond description," she said.

According to 2025 figures cited by Al-Karib, 840 women were being held in prisons controlled by the Sudanese army.

She said women who remained in RSF-controlled areas had been exposed to numerous abuses, while also facing the daily struggle of securing basic necessities for their families.

Many had assumed enormous responsibilities to keep their families alive and safe, she said, forcing them to deal with the authorities imposed on them by the RSF in order to obtain food, healthcare, and other essentials.

Al-Karib said such actions were civilian acts that could not be treated as crimes. Those involved were civilians entitled to protection under Sudanese law, she said, and their attempts to sustain their families should not be transformed into grounds for prosecution or punishment.

*Capital punishment in Sudan is legal under Article 27 of the Sudanese Criminal Act 1991. Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Sudan is a state party, stipulates that "sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes."

Note: This report has been translated from Arabic with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools, and subsequently reviewed and adapted by a human editor before publication.