Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what steps he is taking to help support the UN fact finding mission to collect and preserve evidence of potential human rights and international humanitarian law violations in Sudan.

UK-led lobbying at the United Nations Human Rights Council in October 2024 directly led to the UN Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) securing a mandate extension with an increased majority. The Minister for Africa hosted a roundtable in Geneva in February where experts from the FFM briefed member states about the situation in Sudan to increase understanding regarding the atrocities being perpetrated. This year we will provide roughly £1 million to support the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), a research body gathering open-source evidence about the conflict in Sudan with a view to supporting future accountability. The CIR has been able to assist the FFM in verifying reports of violations through its use of digital information. Human rights violations and abuses by all sides in Sudan's brutal conflict must be investigated impartially. The FFM is the most effective mechanism to support accountability in Sudan. The UK will strongly support its expected mandate renewal later this year in voting at the Human Rights Council.