Introduction

The recent debate inside the European Parliament over past and ongoing atrocities in Sudan exposes a profound moral contradiction at the heart of contemporary European political discourse. El-Fasher, the historic capital of North Darfur, is not an obscure or peripheral city. It is home to hundreds of thousands of civilians and has long served as a refuge for those fleeing waves of violence since the Darfur conflict began in 2003. Today, however, it has become the epicentre of one of the most brutal sieges in Sudan’s current war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary militia accused of mass killings, starvation tactics, and systematic attacks against civilians since the outbreak of the current war.

International human rights organisations have documented grave violations in and around El-Fasher, including indiscriminate killing, mass displacement, sexual violence, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid, acts that meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.¹ Yet, despite the severity and documentation of these crimes, Europe’s political response has been marked by evasion rather than accountability.

Condemning Violence Without Naming Its Enablers

In recent months, the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning violence in Sudan. Early drafts of this resolution explicitly named the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a key external actor accused in investigative reports by UN experts of supplying arms and financial support to the RSF.2  However, following intense political pressure, particularly from right-wing and far-right groups, the reference was removed in the final text. The official justification was the need to preserve “diplomatic balance” and avoid alienating strategic partners. The removal of the UAE reference was not due to lack of evidence, but the result of coordinated pressure by right-wing and far-right parliamentary blocs, supported by strategic calculations within centre-right delegations from France, Italy, Hungary, and parts of Germany.3

The statement refers to the final resolution of the European Parliament, titled Resolution on the escalation of the war and the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan (2025/2984 (RSP)), adopted on 27 November 2025 during the Strasbourg plenary session. The resolution condemns grave atrocities and violations of international humanitarian law committed in Sudan, but does so in general and abstract terms, calling on “all external actors” to cease arms supplies without naming any specific states documented as sustaining the RSF.4 This omission has been criticised by analysts and civil society organisations as a form of political sanitisation that weakens accountability and reduces condemnation to a largely symbolic gesture.5

Europe’s Migration Policies and the Question of Indirect Responsibility

An important clarification is necessary. There is no officially documented evidence proving that European institutions directly fund the Rapid Support Forces. The EU has consistently denied providing any financial or military assistance to armed groups in Sudan, emphasising that its engagement has focused on humanitarian aid, development cooperation, and migration management.

However, this official position does not resolve the ethical and political debate around the arming of the conflicting parties in the conflict in Sudan. Investigative journalism and academic research have raised serious questions about whether EU-funded border control and migration management initiatives, particularly under frameworks such as the Khartoum Process and the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, have indirectly empowered Sudanese security actors who later became central to the RSF or closely cooperated with it.6

For example, research conducted by the Clingendael Institute has shown how EU migration cooperation with Sudan during the Bashir era contributed to the militarization of border governance and strengthened abusive security institutions operating under international legitimacy.7 Further investigations by cross-border journalism networks have documented how European funds, while not intended for militias, flowed into opaque security structures with minimal accountability.8These claims remain contested and unproven in a strict judicial sense, yet they raise legitimate moral and political questions about responsibility, oversight, and the unintended consequences of external migration control policies.

Selective Morality and the Rejection of Sudanese Refugees

The contradiction becomes even more striking when one considers that the same political forces that opposed naming external backers of the RSF are also among the most vocal opponents of allowing Sudanese refugees into Europe. Sudanese civilians enduring siege, hunger, and terror in El-Fasher are recognised abstractly as victims of war, yet are denied concrete protection when they attempt to flee that war-ravaged region.

In contemporary European politics, a Sudanese civilian escaping Darfur is often framed not as a survivor of mass violence, but as a political inconvenience. Right-wing parties condemn war crimes rhetorically, while simultaneously pushing for harsher asylum regimes and tighter borders. This is not merely an inconsistency; it is a deliberate political strategy rooted in selective morality and the instrumentalization of human suffering for domestic electoral gain.

Acknowledging external involvement in Sudan’s war raises an uncomfortable, but unavoidable question for Europe: to what extent have European policies materially contributed to the conditions producing Sudan’s victims? Europe’s responsibility does not derive from formal peace or mediation mandates, roles institutionally assigned to organisations such as IGAD, the African Union, or the United Nations, but from its direct political, financial, and security entanglement with Sudan through migration governance and border externalisation policies.9 Since the mid-2010s, European states and EU institutions have pursued migration containment strategies that delegated border control to Sudanese security actors in exchange for financial support, technical assistance, and political engagement.10 These arrangements were formalised through initiatives such as the Khartoum Process and the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which channelled resources to Sudan’s security apparatus under the rubric of combating irregular migration. Crucially, these policies involved cooperation with paramilitary forces that later became central protagonists in the armed conflict.11

In this context, Europe cannot plausibly claim the neutrality afforded to multilateral organisations whose roles are limited to diplomacy or humanitarian coordination. Rather, Europe exercised policy agency, financial leverage, and strategic choice, while simultaneously depoliticising these relationships in parliamentary and policy documents.12 The omission of external sponsors and armed intermediaries thus functions to insulate European migration governance from ethical and legal scrutiny, allowing Europe to appear as a humanitarian observer rather than a political actor implicated in the structural conditions of Sudan’s war and displacement.13

The Human Cost of Political Evasion

By viewing the war in Sudan through the lens of competing national interests and EU migration policies, Sudanese lives become collateral damage in Europe’s political calculations. Images of famine and displacement from El-Fasher and El-Geneina are quietly instrumentalized and mobilized to justify restrictive border policies, while the root causes of displacement, external arms flows, geopolitical alliances, and complicity with armed groups are deliberately obscured. Sudanese people living in war-affected cities and regions are mostly victimized and treated as collateral damage. Those who attempt to flee the country as refugees or migrants seeking entry into Europe are securitized threats, even as the war becomes a tool for advancing polarising political agendas.

This pattern reflects a broader crisis in Europe’s approach to forced migration, one that scholars have long identified as externalised responsibility and moral outsourcing. Europe’s commitment to human rights appears principled only so long as it does not conflict with geopolitical interests or domestic populist pressures.

Conclusion

Sudanese civilians living in or seeking to leave war zones bear the full cost of this selective morality. They endure a war sustained by external actors who remain politically shielded. They flee violence, starvation, and terror, only to encounter suspicion and exclusion. They are recognised as victims only when that recognition demands nothing of Europe, no accountability, no protection, no courage.

Sudan needs more than symbolic concern. It requires the clear acknowledgement that the RSF has committed widespread atrocities; that specific external actors have armed and financed it; and that millions of displaced Sudanese are not opportunistic migrants, but survivors of a war they did not choose. Above all, it requires abandoning the artificial distinction that allows Europe to condemn atrocities while refusing responsibility for those displaced by them.

Endnotes

  1. Human Rights Watch, “Sudan: Mass Atrocities by Rapid Support Forces in Darfur,” 2023, https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/27/sudan-new-mass-ethnic-killings-pillage-darfur.
  2. United Nations Security Council, Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Sudan Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1591 (2005), UN Doc. S/2024/65 (New York: United Nations, January 15, 2024), https://undocs.org/S/2024/65
  3. Euronews, “European Parliament condemns war in Sudan without mentioning UAE,” Euronews, November 28, 2025, https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/11/28/european-parliament-condemns-war-in-sudan-without-mentioning-uae
  4. European Parliament, Resolution on the escalation of the war and the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan, 2025/2984(RSP), adopted at the Strasbourg plenary session, 27 November 2025, Legislative Observatory (OEIL), https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/document-summary?id=1874597.
  5. Ibid.
  6. European Commission, “EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa,” accessed 2025, https://trust-fund-for-africa.europa.eu/.
  7. Jérôme Tubiana, Claudio Warin, and Gaffar Mohamed Saeneen, Multilateral Damage: The impact of EU migration policies on central Saharan routes (Clingendael Institute, 2018),https://www.clingendael.org/sites/default/files/2018-09/multilateral-damage.pdf
  8. Investigative Journalism for Europe, “The EU’s ‘Pact with the Devil’,” 2023, https://investigativejournalismforeu.net/projects/the-eus-pact-with-the-devil/
  9. Jeff Crisp, Mobilizing Political Will for Refugee Protection and Solutions: A Framework for Analysis and Action, World Refugee Council Research Paper No. 1 (Waterloo, ON: Centre for International Governance Innovation, June 27, 2018), https://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/documents/WRC%20Research%20Paper%20no.1web.pdf
  10. Julien Brachet, “Manufacturing Smugglers: From Irregular to Clandestine Mobility in the Sahara,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 676, no. 1 (2018): 16–35. https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/anname/v676y2018i1p16-35.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com
  11. Martini, Lorena Stella, and Tarek Megerisi. Road to nowhere: Why Europe’s border externalisation is a dead end. Policy Brief, European Council on Foreign Relations, 14 December 2023,  https://ecfr.eu/publication/road-to-nowhere-why-europes-border-externalisation-is-a-dead-end/
  12. Sarah Léonard and Christian Kaunert, “The Securitisation of Migration in the European Union,” Journal of Common Market Studies 59, no. 2 (2021): 381–398, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1851469
  13. de Waal, Alex. 2019.Sudan: a political marketplace framework analysis. Occasional Paper No. 19. World Peace Foundation & Conflict Research Programme, London School of Economics and Political Science,  https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/101291/1/De_Waal_Sudan_a_political_marketplace_analysis_published.pdf
  14. Heaven Crawley et al., Unravelling Europe’s ‘Migration Crisis’: Journeys over Land and Sea (Policy Press, 2019), https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/unravelling-europes-migration-crisis