In Sudan’s civil war, the unspeakable atrocity crimes committed by both sides—the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)—are directly enabled and sustained by the supply of weapons and military equipment through the country’s porous borders. Therefore, policymakers must prioritize targeting and disrupting these transnational arms supply networks.
One such effort is currently being debated by the United Nations Security Council, which is considering whether to extend and expand an existing arms embargo on Darfur, with a vote scheduled for Oct. 8. The Security Council first imposed the arms embargo by adopting Resolution 1556 in 2004, importantly, banning the supply of arms to the Janjaweed, which later turned into the RSF, the militia committing genocide today. Resolution 1591 (2005) expanded the embargo to include all other armed actors in Darfur. The arms embargo, however, remains one of the most underutilized and flouted binding legal instruments—an egregious, yet practically consequential, gap in the international system that has not received the attention it deserves. Plus, the total failure of a decades-long arms embargo further fuels cynicism toward the international system more generally.
Today, the RSF essentially controls Darfur, and so, the debate at the Security Council has devolved into a struggle between backers of the RSF (which includes the United Arab Emirates) and the SAF (whose supporters oppose expansion of the arms embargo). The United States is pushing for a proposal to expand the embargo to the whole country, maintaining that “a long-term technical rollover of this mandate is not an option.” Although that premise is correct—the status quo embargo is ineffectual and must adapt to present realities—the U.S. focus is misplaced and skips a step that would give the existing embargo teeth. Why should the Security Council expand a (largely symbolic) embargo without first developing the infrastructure needed to operationalize its coverage of Darfur, already a complex territory to monitor?
We have observed the UAE redoubling its efforts to influence Security Council action on Sudan in recent months. Even the U.S. proposal to expand the arms embargo is suspected to be driven by the UAE’s efforts to reshape Sudan’s dynamics on the ground in favor of the RSF after recent military setbacks. The Trump administration’s credibility on this issue is completely compromised by its perceived allegiance to the UAE, a bias that was seemingly strengthened by the $500 million direct investment made by UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture.
Rather than the U.S. proposal, the Security Council’s main focus should be ensuring compliance with its existing resolutions that are binding on all U.N. member States. Without compliance, the Security Council loses all credibility and authority. Worse, the false assurance of an empty arms embargo signals to arms suppliers that there are no consequences for fueling the conflict, turning the institution entrusted with maintaining international peace and security into one contributing to destabilization. To avoid this outcome, the Security Council needs to give the current Darfur arms embargo concrete backing so it can halt the supply of arms sustaining this genocidal conflict.
The UAE, the Most Significant Arms Embargo Violator
The independent U.N. body assigned to monitor implementation of the Darfur arms embargo is the U.N. Panel of Experts on Sudan, which has documented significant violations since the start of the conflict in April 2023, including tracing RSF main supply lines to the UAE. But the U.N. Panel of Experts is not equipped to deal with the scope of this mandate, given its paltry resources and merely five independent experts, only one of whom is an arms specialist, all working remotely. Moreover, the Panel’s work, appointments, and logistics entirely depend on the political wrangling of the Security Council, including intensive negotiations delaying extensions to the Panel’s mandate and the dilution of final report findings, likely due to internal pressure by implicated countries. Specifically, as the authors have confirmed in closed-door meetings with U.N. diplomats, the Panel has undergone significant pressure to remove or temper its allegations against the UAE.
The U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan (FFM), a separate Human Rights Council-appointed body, further traced RSF supply lines to the UAE, Libya, and other nearby countries, and linked RSF atrocities, including genocidal violence in El Fasher, to such external support. The FFM finding that UAE support played an indispensable role in the RSF’s “capacity to sustain operations” (September 2026 Report, para. 73) echoes intelligence and confidential evidence we repeatedly receive through our engagements with diplomats, investigators, and the intelligence community. It is the lack of sensible monitoring and enforcement that has enabled the UAE to fund a campaign of genocide since 2024 against primarily the Massalit and Zaghawa, non-Arab ethnic groups in West and North Darfur states. Other investigations have further corroborated the UAE’s embargo violations. Given these documented violations, the Security Council should focus on investigating and exposing actors already verified as violators rather than discussing the expansion of a symbolic arms embargo.
While other outside actors have supplied the SAF, including Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the UAE is the most significant violator of the current arms embargo that applies to Darfur, which is nearly entirely controlled by the UAE’s proxy, the RSF. Moreover, the UAE is consistently identified as the most consequential external actor meddling in the conflict.
But there are no independent mechanisms in place to officially inspect the documented Emirati cargo shipments via regional airports and off-the-grid airstrips. The lack of appropriate monitoring or enforcement mechanisms partly allows the UAE to deny allegations or to claim its shipments are “humanitarian” in nature, taking a plausible deniability strategy and shielding itself from scrutiny by the U.N.’s highest executive authority. And when the UAE refuses to disclose flight manifests or ships weapons on circuitous routes through dangerous off-the-radar terrain to Darfur, the power of the U.N. Panel of Experts ends there, as it lacks subpoena power and adequate resources to conduct the necessary investigation into these complex arms shipments.
Recommendations for Arms Embargo Compliance
Given the cracks in the current system through which arms continue to sustain this conflict, diplomats should consider bringing a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for arms embargo compliance. They should also lobby the U.N. and the African Union for the establishment of a dedicated illicit arms transfer monitoring institution.
First, States can bring a case to the ICJ to adjudicate State compliance with the U.N. arms embargo, either against the UAE and/or intermediary States, for funneling arms to Darfur. The fact that Sudan, the site of the world’s largest conflict-driven humanitarian crisis, is omitted from the list of ongoing ICJ cases speaks to a deeply systematic injustice. By contrast, the cases addressing contemporary mass atrocities (in Myanmar, Gaza, and two Ukraine cases) are all at advanced stages of proceedings, and they began in 2019, 2023, 2022, and 2017, respectively.
In May 2025, the only case that has appeared before the ICJ in response to the Sudan conflict came and went within just two months. The Court quickly dismissed the case for manifest lack of jurisdiction based on the UAE’s archaic, and increasingly obsolete, Article IX reservation to the Genocide Convention (which gives the ICJ jurisdiction). While there are ample grounds to overturn such unjust reservations evading responsibility under the Genocide Convention, there are other legal bases to bring a different, but indisputably necessary case for Sudan.
The Darfur Arms Embargo, based on the Security Council’s authority under the U.N. Charter (Chapter VII Article 25), provides such grounds to bring an ICJ case, as Security Council decisions are legally binding on all U.N. member States. Breaches of the Arms Embargo fall squarely within ICJ jurisdiction under Article 36 of the Court’s Statute. The Sudan ICJ case can be further pled and buttressed by the Geneva Conventions, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and even the Genocide Convention.
The ICJ carries a unique ability to issue urgent provisional measures in short order, which can serve to protect the Sudanese people at immediate risk of genocide. As long as the conflict persists, so does the risk of irreparable harm (standard for provisional measures) to the most fundamental treaties and vulnerable protected groups thereunder.
An ICJ intervention would have real consequences on the ground and strengthen the rule of law by setting a precedent for arms embargo violations. A binding judicial determination would clarify and expand the factual record, bring additional evidence to light, counter any denials by violating States, hold States accountable for violations, and provide further legal bases for targeted sanctions or domestic legal proceedings against key perpetrators and enablers. A declaratory order from the world’s highest court would give diplomats a concrete avenue for intervention and ongoing response to the conflict.
States can also take preliminary steps by confronting UAE diplomats privately over their country’s arms supplying and complicity allegations in Sudan or issuing public statements demanding that the UAE comply with the embargo.
Second, diplomats and international lawyers should push for the establishment of a dedicated international institution to monitor arms embargoes and illicit arms transfers, as the new frontier in international justice and accountability. The burden of investigating illicit arms transfers, cargo flight contents, flight manifests, arms export licenses, and end-use agreements, then tracing arms through serial numbers or other indicia to the insignia of fighters on the ground is well beyond the capacity of NGOs and independent investigators alone. An illicit arms transfer monitoring institution can serve to prevent and hold violators accountable, complementing international criminal prosecutions, which largely address violence after-the-fact. It is clear that domestic systems fail to sufficiently track all illicit arms transfers to high-risk conflict zones used in mass atrocities. An international oversight institution can draw on the International Atomic Energy Agency model and operate through a centralized, remote monitoring headquarters and a rotation of dedicated inspectors in the field, independent of political influence, monitoring key smuggling points of entry, including unannounced on-site visits.
Alternatively, the U.N. can narrowly circumscribe a monitoring mechanism for the Sudan conflict specifically, which has lacked the necessary international resources and attention it requires. While there remain political obstacles in the way of a peacekeeping force, a U.N.-mandated mission designated to conduct cross-border inspections at high-risk entry points along Sudan’s borders and equipped with advanced technologies to detect suspicious cargo flights can bridge the enforcement gap over the unobstructed supply of weapons sustaining the conflict.
Simply put, the existing international regimes tasked with addressing the atrocities in Sudan are incapable of effectively ending or reducing the violence. Worse, the processes themselves are actively undermined and violated by malign external actors like the UAE. It is incumbent upon U.N. member States, therefore, to reinforce the international legal mechanisms already in place.
