(17 July 2026) On 17 July, the world marks International Justice Day, commemorating the adoption of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court.
For most countries, it's a date for polite commemoration, but for Sudan, it is closer to an indictment. Since 1955, the country has gone from one war to the next with a consistency that stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like a pattern: the first civil war, the second, Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile, and now the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. Each time, civilians absorb the damage, a political deal eventually gets struck, the people responsible are quietly folded back into power, and the war that follows looks almost exactly like the one before it.
You can see the mechanism working in real time right now. When the RSF took El Fasher in October 2025, the last city it needed to control all of Darfur, the reports that followed described the same kind of ethnically targeted killing that defined Darfur in 2003. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk didn't call this a one-off. He warned explicitly that what happened in El Fasher risks happening again in Kordofan, where the RSF and allied forces are now advancing. That's not a metaphor about a "cycle of violence." That's a UN official naming the same actors, the same methods, and the same likely outcome, eighteen months apart, because nothing in between stopped them.
Sudan keeps making the same mistake: treating justice as something that can wait until after peace is settled. It never works out that way. Peace without accountability has been an intermission, not an ending. The war now entering its fourth year has killed tens of thousands, well over 100,000 people; displaced more than 10 million; and left large parts of the country in famine. None of that happened because peace was impossible. It happened because the last several rounds of "peace" left the machinery of impunity fully intact.
The UN's Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan and the African Union's human rights bodies have both said versions of the same thing, from different angles: you don't get durable peace without independent investigations, prosecutions, victim participation, reparations and institutional reform. That's not an abstract wish list. It's a description of what's currently missing.
And the justice problem in Sudan isn't only that crimes go uninvestigated; it's that the institutions meant to investigate them have been hollowed out by years of war. When courts can't function, and political considerations override legal ones, justice becomes something that happens to your enemies and never to your allies. People stop trusting the law and start looking for protection somewhere else, often from the same armed groups driving the conflict.
Victims tend to disappear from this conversation entirely. Coverage of Sudan is almost always about ceasefires, troop movements and which ‘general’ is winning. The survivors of sexual violence, the families still searching for the disappeared, the communities displaced out of El Geneina and El Fasher they show up as casualty figures, not as people with a stake in what accountability should look like. Justice isn't just a prosecution count. It's whether the people harmed are heard, protected, and compensated in some real way.
The ICC has already shown what it can and can't do here. It has outstanding warrants against Omar al-Bashir, Ahmad Harun, Ali Kushayb and Abdel Raheem Hussein over Darfur, proof that even a head of state isn't automatically out of reach. But an arrest warrant sitting unenforced for two decades also shows the limits of that reach. The Court cannot reform a judiciary or compel a State to arrest its own former president, nor was it designed to replace domestic courts. Rather, under the principle of complementarity, the ICC exercises jurisdiction only where national authorities are unwilling or genuinely unable to investigate or prosecute international crimes. Its role is therefore to complement domestic justice, not to substitute for effective national institutions.
Recent legal proceedings concerning Sudan also demonstrate both the promise and the limitations of international justice. Sudan instituted proceedings against the United Arab Emirates before the International Court of Justice, alleging violations of the Genocide Convention arising from the conflict in Darfur. Although the case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, it illustrates a broader reality: where domestic accountability mechanisms fail, victims and States increasingly turn to international legal institutions in search of justice. Those institutions, however, remain constrained by the limits of their respective jurisdictions and enforcement powers.
Breaking this isn't a single fix. It must happen at three levels that reinforce each other rather than substitute for one another.
1. Communities need support to document what's happening to them and get services to survivors while the war is still going on.
2. Sudan's national judiciary needs to be reformed into an independent institution capable of prosecuting serious crimes without political interference or pressure from military and armed actors.
3. Where domestic justice can't or won't move, international mechanisms, the ICC, sanctions, evidence preservation, and sustained diplomatic pressure must keep the door open.
Accountability is not only about punishment. For thousands of Sudanese families still searching for disappeared relatives, justice also means knowing the truth about what happened and where their loved ones are. International Justice Day shouldn't just be a ceremony for a 1998 treaty. For Sudan, it's a reminder that the war currently killing and starving people didn't start because peace was unattainable; it started, at least in part, because the last peace deal never held anyone accountable. Ending this one the same way just books the next one.
By Christine Kirabo (Legal Programs Officer, ACJPS)