Sudan @ICESCR
The human rights dimensions of land form the central theme of a new parallel report on Sudan’s performance under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) that HIC-HLRN has submitted at Geneva in August 2015. HIC-HLRN coordinated with three Member organizations from Sudan to prepare the parallel report for the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) at its 56th session for the second periodic review of the state party’s implementation of the Covenant. Sudan had submitted its report to CESCR in 2013, ten years after its 2003 deadline.
The Social Peace Initiative for Darfur Housing and Land Rights, the Sudanese Human Rights Monitor and the Nuba Mountains International Association, representing the indigenous peoples living both in their native South Kordofan and in their diaspora, contributed valuable insight and research to the fact-filled 27-page review. The result is a critical analysis of government policies and practices to respect, protect and fulfill of CESCR’s obligations on priority issues related to three main articles of the Covenant: Article 1, on self-determination and the corresponding right to natural wealth and resources; Article 11, on the human right to an adequate standard of living, including the human right to adequate housing and food and Article 15, guaranteeing the human right to participate in culture. These three covenanted rights form a human rights treaty basis for claims to a human right to land.
The HIC-HLRN report demonstrated how the single-party-dominated Government of Sudan (GoS) implements policies and practices of impoverishment, systematic discrimination, deprivation of the means of subsistence, displacement, and dispossession that ultimately lead to dismemberment of the state in 2011 and emergence of an independent South Sudan.
Also, the report reviewed Committee’s previous observations and expression of concern over war in southern Sudan that still adversely affects economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) condition, in particular, the IDP problem. In its last review of Sudan in 2000, CESCR had urged the state party to “address the root causes”of the corresponding human rights violations. Then however, the Committee did not issue recommendations related to these gross violations and missed an opportunity to assess the progressive implementation of the Covenant by GoS in the particular aspect of the state party’s land policies.
Land administration forms a common feature in the realization of each of the three covenanted economic, social and cultural rights covered in the HIC-HLRN parallel report. It also demonstrated how land administration and the impacts of implementing the Unregistered Lands Act of 1970 have been inconsistent with the principles and corresponding state obligations of the Covenant. The report identifies these practices of successive Sudanese governments as root causes of a range of human rights violations by generating the contradictions between the customary land-tenure systems and the statutory title-based system, including those resulting from consequent dispossession and displacement from both armed conflict and development.
The report covers both of these two contexts, while large-scale mechanized agriculture and infrastructure are the principle subjects of development-induced human rights violations, according to HIC-HLRN’s report. It goes far in demonstrating how development and war interplay across the country and continue over the review period.
Also, HIC-HLRN reviewed on the extraterritorial human rights obligations of the Republic of Sudan, as well as the development partners—including other states—operating within, and otherwise affecting human rights in Sudan’s territorial jurisdiction. Notably, the report cites China, an ICESCR treaty partner and backer of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, as bearing the simultaneous obligation to ensure that Chinese companies operating in Sudan comply with all relevant international standards affecting ESCR in the Republic of Sudan.
The food and nutrition rights situation was also a subject of the report, citing that one out of every two people in Sudan now lacks the means to obtain a minimum food and non-food bundle of basic subsistence. It emphasized the link between land and natural-resource deprivation and the dramatic levels of chronic malnutrition affecting 44.8% of the population below the food poverty line, with higher food poverty in rural areas (55%, as compared with 28% in urban areas). The report notes also additionally that1.2 million Sudanese children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition.
HIC-HLRN’s report on Sudan’s performance under ICESCR concludes with a set of recommendations: indispensable measures for GoS to undertake in order to comply with the state’s human rights treaty obligations. It also urged CESCR to develop a clear interpretation of the covenanted human rights related to land in the form of a General Comment on the subject to advise all states parties to the treaty.
This joint parallel report of HIC-HLRN and its Members marks the first occasion in which Sudanese civil society organizations have reported on the implementation of this seminal human rights treaty in their country. The “constructive dialog” between CESCR and the Sudan delegation took place on 1–2 October 2015, with the Committee issuing its Concluding Observations on 9 October 2015, dedicating a special section on “the rights of land users.” The Committee urged the Republic of Sudan to “take account of the 2012 Voluntary Guidelines on the responsible governance of the tenure of land, fisheries and forests,” ensuring that “no land […] be ceded to investors or for development projects without being preceded by a full human rights impact assessment and without seeking the free, prior and informed consent of the communities who depend on the land for their livelihoods [and ensuring that] land users who consider that their rights have been violated have access to redress” (paras. 11–12)
Download the full HIC-HLRN report on the HLRN website and at OHCHR.
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