Yasmin Sooka, Chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, speaking during a press conference in Juba in February 2024. Photo Credit Charles Wote/Eye Radio.

The UN Human Rights Commission says South Sudanese are looking to the African Union and the region to rescue them from a preventable fate.

In a statement sent to Eye Radio news room today, the commission urges AU and UN security councils to act decisively as crisis deepens, demanding urgent action and renewed commitment to peace, accountability and a credible transition.

It says South Sudan’s escalating political crisis is driving renewed armed violence, compounding already dire human rights and humanitarian conditions, while heightening regional instability, the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan warned today.

Despite one decade of efforts by the African Union and regional actors to support the peace process, the commission says, South Sudan’s leaders have deliberately stalled progress and brought the country to yet another precipice.

According to the statement, armed clashes are occurring on a scale not seen since a cessation of hostilities was signed in 2017, with civilians bearing the brunt of human rights violations and displacements.

Concluding its mission to the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, the Commission underscored that South Sudan’s justice and accountability vacuum continues to fuel political intransigence, impunity, conflict and corruption.

The Commission also engaged African Union officials, emphasizing the need for urgency in establishing the transitional justice mechanisms reaffirmed in Chapter five of the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan, notably the Hybrid Court.

According to the commission, renewed armed clashes have forced thousands of South Sudanese to flee once more.

In 2025 alone, it added, an estimated 300,000 South Sudanese fled the country, largely due to the increasing conflict with 148,000 new arrivals into Sudan; 50,000 to Ethiopia; 50,000 to Uganda; 30,000 to the Democratic Republic of Congo; and 25,000 to Kenya.

In Addis Ababa, the Commission consulted with the AU Ad Hoc Committee on South Sudan (C5 group), members of the AU Peace and Security Council, African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, diplomats, UN, IGAD, and senior AU officials, including from the Office of the Legal Counsel.

The Commission stressed the need for intensified regional efforts to de-escalate and address political tensions and surging armed contestation in South Sudan and called for sustained progress to advance a holistic transitional justice agenda.

It underlined that only an inclusive and credible political transition, supported by the AU, IGAD, the United Nations, and guarantors of the peace agreement, working in tandem with the international community, can prevent further deterioration and violations.

The commission urged sustained and focused diplomatic engagement to ensure that all actors, including armed and political groups currently outside the peace framework, are brought into a consensus-based process committed to peace and human rights.

“The crisis unfolding in South Sudan is the result of deliberate choices made by its leaders to put their interests above those of their people. The region and the international community must now prevail upon South Sudan’s leaders to make a different choice, one that puts their people first,” said Yasmin Sooka, the chair of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan.