Geneva event calls for verification
Human rights speakers meeting in Geneva have urged the United Nations and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to establish an independent mission to examine allegations that Sudan’s army used chlorine weapons during its conflict with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The appeal was made on Friday at a conference held alongside the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council on 25 September. The Paris Integration Forum (PIF), a Paris-based centre focused on Middle East human rights and regional geopolitical developments, organised the event.
Under the title From Local Evidence to Global Action Connecting Community Realities to Human Rights Policies, the conference brought together rights advocates, academics and journalists from several countries.
Call for access to alleged sites
Claudia Wädlich, a German lawyer and politician, said allegations by the United States that Sudanese forces used chemical weapons in 2024 required a serious response. Sudan joined the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1999, she noted, meaning that any officially established use by the army would amount to a criminal offence.
Wädlich said the army should permit the testing of soil, water and buried bodies at locations identified in the reports. She also called on the UN and OPCW to send an independent investigative team to Sudan.
She said the supply chain for chlorine gas should be followed from export through to end use, particularly where shipments might enter conflict areas.
Concerns over escalation
Bjertnes Carl-Gustav, who leads the Seed-Africa organisation, described the reported use of chemical weapons as a grave escalation that would deepen the hardship faced by civilians.
He warned that chemical warfare is not simply another military method: it undermines human dignity, erodes international rules developed over decades and can encourage imitation and retaliatory violence. Carl-Gustav said an independent UN commission should be accepted by Sudan’s army without conditions.
He said civilians need more than statements of concern; they need verification, justice and lasting international engagement.
Reports and official action
Separate investigations by The Washington Post and The New York Times, published on 5 September, described what they said was a secret Sudanese army effort to build, test and store chlorine-filled bombs. The Post said Middle Eastern security officials supplied documents, videos and messages for its review.
Messages cited by the Washington Post suggested that up to 290 chemical munitions had been stored at Merowe Air Base and that 106 had been used. The Times reported that messages involving army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan indicated that he knew about the alleged programme. Sudan’s military has called the allegations baseless, according to Gulf News.
The US first accused Sudan’s government of using chemical weapons in 2024 in May 2025. Additional sanctions were imposed under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991, according to a Federal Register notice published on 20 July 2026.
Kashmir concerns also raised
Conference participants also called for stronger international legal protections against rights violations and highlighted reports of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in Kashmir.
Sardar Shaukat Ali Kashmiri, an exiled Pakistani politician and rights activist, called for independent investigations into alleged extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention and disappearances in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) and Pakistan-occupied Gilgit-Baltistan (PoGB).
Kashmiri, chairman of the United Kashmir People’s National Party (UKPNP), said the Human Rights Council should act to protect the lives and fundamental rights of millions of Kashmiris. He called on Pakistan to stop using force against peaceful protesters and to release those he described as arbitrarily detained. The UKPNP supports a united and independent Jammu and Kashmir, and Kashmiri has lived in exile in Switzerland since April 1999.
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