UN Report: War Crimes Are Widespread In South Sudan

Families wait in the early hours of the morning to be registered prior to a food distribution carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and partner agencies, in Thonyor, Leer county, South Sudan. Unicef

UN News: South Sudan: ‘Outraged’ UN experts say ongoing widespread human rights violations may amount to war crimes

United Nations investigators on Wednesday denounced a raft of gross human rights violations being perpetrated in South Sudan, where over the past year, incidents of rape have surged and abductions, sexual slavery and brutal killings “have become commonplace.”

“There is a confirmed pattern of how combatants attack villages, plunder homes, take women as sexual slaves and then set homes alight – often with people in them,” Yasmin Sooka, Chair of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan said in Nairobi at the launch of the launch of the three-member expert-body’s third report.

“Rapes, gang rapes, sexual mutilation, abductions and sexual slavery, as well as killings, have become commonplace in South Sudan,” she continued. “There is no doubt that these crimes are persistent because impunity is so entrenched that every kind of norm is broken.”

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Update #1: U.N. reports mass rape, killings, torture in South Sudan, seeks oil scrutiny (Reuters)
Update #2: UN identifies South Sudan's mass rapists, killers and torturers (Al Jazeera)

WNU Editor: The UN report is here .... Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan (UN Human Rights Council).