The Sudanese man who is in custody in Belfast settled in the city after travelling through Paris and Dublin. In 2023, he was given asylum by the British Home Office.
That same year, Sudan descended into civil war, a conflict that continues to rage with appalling accounts of barbarity. On the one side are the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and on the other the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Caught in the middle are civilians, particularly women and children, who are being abused by both sides.
Earlier this year, the UN’s Human Rights Council accused combatants of displaying ‘utter disregard for human life’. Schools, hospitals and markets have been targeted indiscriminately, and ‘bodies of Sudanese women and girls have been weaponised to terrorise communities’. The UN explained that gang rape, sexual torture and slavery are commonplace.
The ongoing civil war is the latest outbreak of violence in a country that has rarely known peace in the last three quarters of a century. The first civil war in Sudan began in 1955 and lasted until 1972; the second erupted in 1983 and continued until 2005. Who knows how long this third civil war will last.
What about the fundamental rights of Europeans?
The Sudanese man arrested in Belfast is 30; he was a child during the second civil war. In 2004, Human Rights Watch published a report in which it described how civilians, regardless of their age or sex, were massacred. ‘Some women had their breasts cut with knives. Parents reportedly were given the choice whether they would prefer their children were shot or thrown in the fire.’
The man in custody in Belfast may have witnessed some of these war crimes as a child. He may not. We also don’t know about the history of the 4,432 Sudanese – mainly young men – who arrived in England last year on small boats. Or the 2,748 who crossed the Channel illegally in 2024. In 2022, a year before the start of the latest civil war, 1,762 Sudanese sailed from France to England in small boats. Most of the French weren’t sad to see them go.
In April 2020, a 33-year-old Sudanese refugee stabbed two people to death and wounded five others in a random attack in the town of Romans-sur-Isère, south-eastern France. Police later found religious manuscripts in which the man – jailed last year for 30 years – complained about living in a country of ‘disbelievers’. That attack occurred a few weeks before a Sudanese asylum seeker was shot dead by police in Glasgow after stabbing six people in the city centre. The dead man had first claimed asylum in Belfast in 2019.
There have also been a spate of violent sexual attacks in France committed by Sudanese men. Most victims have been women – including children – but in January this year, a Sudanese man was convicted of raping a homeless man. He had already been imprisoned for rape but was not deported ‘because homosexuality is considered a crime in his country’.
The French state has tried on occasion to address the issue of Sudanese refugees. In December 2023 they deported a Sudanese man accused of theft and held others in detention centres with a view to expulsion. But such was the fury from left-wing politicians and human rights organisations that nearly all were given leave to stay.
In April 2024, Le Monde – the newspaper of the Paris elite – published a letter from several leading human rights figures, including the presidents of Amnesty International and Médecins sans frontières. It was entitled, ‘All Sudanese asylum seekers must be protected, without exception’.
The signatories criticised France for attempting to deport a few Sudanese it considered undesirable. The letter declared:
Fundamental rights, including the right to life and the right not to be subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, are being jeopardized to satisfy the objective of increasing deportations.
What about the fundamental rights of Europeans?
Sudan is a tragic country and only the most hard-hearted wouldn’t sympathise with the plight of those caught up in the latest brutal civil war. But it is dangerously naïve on the part of a minority of Europeans to believe that allowing tens of thousands of Sudanese to settle would be without consequence. Barely anyone has grown up in Sudan this century without witnessing (or perpetrating) acts of extreme depravity.
Should we be surprised when some import these acts to the streets of Europe?
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