Sudan and Darfur: ICC Accountability, Drone Atrocity, and the Impunity Engine

Threat, Justice and Strategic Risk Assessment

Strategic Overview: Accountability Suspended, Atrocity Industrialised

The ICC's semi-annual briefing to the Security Council in July 2026 takes place against a Sudan conflict environment that has crossed from crisis into what ASA assesses as a systematic atrocity industrialisation phase — one in which drone warfare against civilian populations, conflict-related sexual violence deployed as an ethnic and political weapon, and the deliberate elimination of accountability mechanisms have combined to produce a civilian protection catastrophe of the first magnitude.

Five interlocking accountability and security dynamics define the current strategic environment:

• The Abd-Al-Rahman Verdict and Its Unfinished Architecture: The ICC's October 2025 conviction and December 2025 sentencing of Ali Kushayb — the first completed trial in the Court's twenty-year engagement with Darfur — represents the most significant accountability milestone in the history of the conflict. It has not produced surrender of the four outstanding suspects, cooperation from the RSF with ongoing investigations, or any measurable change in the conduct of parties currently perpetrating crimes at scale.
• Drone Warfare as the Primary Civilian Killing Instrument: Between January and May 2026, OHCHR documented more than 1,000 civilians killed in drone strikes — approximately 80 percent of all conflict-related civilian deaths recorded in that period. This figure is not a statistical anomaly. It reflects the systematic deployment of drone technology as the primary instrument of civilian population targeting in the current conflict phase, with accountability gaps that existing monitoring mechanisms are structurally unable to close at the pace the death toll is accumulating.
• Conflict-Related Sexual Violence at Unprecedented Scale: The Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights has characterised the scale and brutality of conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan as unprecedented — encompassing gang rape, sexual torture, and sexual enslavement deployed as instruments of ethnic targeting and political terror. This is not incidental violence in a conflict environment. It is a documented, systematic, and continuing crime against humanity.
• ICC Investigation Capacity Under Operational Constraint: The OTP's investigations into El Geneina and El Fasher are advancing against severe operational constraints — limited access to crime scenes, ongoing hostilities, RSF non-cooperation despite previous assurances, and the practical inaccessibility of witnesses and evidence in areas under the authority of individuals allegedly responsible for the crimes being investigated.
• Security Council Political Division as an Impunity Enabler: The Council's deep divisions over the ICC — between members who support the Court's independence and members who have actively sought to undermine it through sanctions, political pressure, and rhetorical delegitimization — are not a procedural footnote to the accountability process. They are a structural impunity enabler. A Security Council that cannot present unified political support for the ICC's Darfur mandate sends a signal to perpetrating parties that accountability carries no enforcement consequence.

These vectors form a vicious circle whose internal logic is self-reinforcing and historically documented: the failure to ensure accountability for the atrocities of 2003–2004 Darfur contributed directly to the recurrence of mass violence in the 2023 conflict and its continuation through 2026. The perpetrators of the current campaign have rational grounds to believe — based on the twenty-year record of selective accountability and institutional obstruction — that the probability of personal criminal consequence for ongoing crimes is low enough to be discounted in their operational calculations. That discounted probability is the engine of current impunity. Breaking it is the central challenge facing the ICC, the Security Council, and the international accountability architecture in Sudan.

The Abd-Al-Rahman Case: Landmark Verdict, Incomplete Strategic Impact

The ICC's conviction of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman on 6 October 2025 — on 27 of 31 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including ordering Janjaweed forces to commit murder and rape — and his subsequent sentencing to 20 years of imprisonment on 9 December 2025 represent the culmination of a trial process that opened on 5 April 2022 and the most consequential accountability outcome in the ICC's engagement with Sudan since the Council's 2005 referral.

The verdict's historical significance is unambiguous. It is the first completed trial arising from the ICC's Darfur jurisdiction. It establishes, through the evidentiary standards of international criminal procedure, that command-level responsibility for systematic mass atrocity in Darfur is legally provable, judicially ad judicable, and personally attributable. For the victims of the 2003–2004 Darfur campaign — families whose members were murdered and whose women were raped under orders that a court has now established were criminally issued — the verdict represents a form of institutional recognition that the international community spent two decades deferring.

The verdict's strategic limitations are equally unambiguous, and ASA's assessment declines to minimise them in the interest of institutional affirmation.

The conviction of Ali Kushayb has not produced the surrender of Omar Al-Bashir, Ahmad Muhammad Harun, Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein, or Abdallah Banda Abakaer Nourain — the four individuals against whom ICC arrest warrants remain outstanding. Sudan's obligation under resolution 1593 and subsequent ICC orders to surrender these individuals has not been fulfilled across any political configuration of the Sudanese state over twenty years. The current conflict has, if anything, reduced the probability of voluntary surrender in the near term: the SAF-led authorities that nominally bear the obligation are engaged in a war for institutional survival, and the RSF has no incentive to produce individuals whose prosecution might eventually expand to encompass the RSF's own leadership.

The conviction has not produced RSF cooperation with the OTP's ongoing investigations. Despite previous assurances that cooperation would be provided, the RSF has failed to respond to the OTP's repeated cooperation requests during the reporting period. An armed actor currently perpetrating documented crimes at scale — including in El Fasher, whose October 2025 offensive the OTP is actively investigating — has no rational incentive to cooperate with the investigation of those crimes while it is perpetrating them. The RSF's non-cooperation is not a procedural failure. It is a deliberate obstruction strategy whose continuation the international community has not imposed costs sufficient to change.

The appeals process — with both prosecution and defence having filed appeals against the sentencing judgment on 10 March 2026, and the Appeals Chamber expected to issue decisions on both the trial and sentencing judgments in the first half of 2027 — means that the first completed Darfur case will remain legally unresolved for at least another year. This extended timeline, while procedurally appropriate, further delays the finality that would strengthen the verdict's deterrence signal.

ASA's assessment is that the Abd-Al-Rahman verdict is a genuine and important accountability milestone that demonstrates the ICC's capacity to complete Darfur prosecutions and establish individual criminal responsibility for command-level atrocity. Its strategic impact on the ongoing conflict is, however, constrained by the absence of surrender of outstanding suspects, the RSF's active non-cooperation, and the political division among Security Council members that prevents the Court's mandate from being backed by unified and credible enforcement pressure.

El Geneina and El Fasher: Investigations into Active Atrocity

The OTP's concurrent investigations into crimes committed in El Geneina between April and July 2023 and in El Fasher following the RSF's October 2025 offensive represent the ICC's most operationally current engagement with the Sudan conflict — and the most acute test of the Court's ability to investigate ongoing atrocity in a hostile, inaccessible, and actively contested operational environment.

El Geneina. The OTP's 24 June report describes a series of key interviews conducted over the previous six months that have strengthened the evidentiary record and broadened the OTP's understanding of crimes committed in El Geneina — the capital of West Darfur — between April and July 2023. The OTP has prioritised investigations into gender-based crimes and crimes against children in this context. El Geneina was the site of some of the most extensively documented mass atrocity incidents of the 2023 conflict's opening phase, including mass killings, systematic sexual violence, and ethnic targeting of non-Arab communities. The OTP's focus on gender-based crimes and crimes against children reflects both the evidentiary record available from El Geneina and the broader pattern of CRSV that the OHCHR and the FFM have documented as a systematic feature of the conflict.

El Fasher. The OTP's investigation into El Fasher — the capital of North Darfur and the last major city in Darfur that was not under RSF control before the October 2025 offensive — is the most politically and operationally consequential dimension of the current investigation cycle. The RSF's October 2025 offensive and subsequent seizure of El Fasher was accompanied by what the OTP's report characterises as widespread violations of IHL and IHRL — mass killings, summary executions, abductions, arbitrary detention, and other abuses against civilians. The OTP has deployed investigators to Sudan and neighbouring countries to interview victims and insider witnesses. The evidence collected to date, according to the report, depicts the commission of war crimes in El Fasher and its surrounding areas, including murder and outrages upon personal dignity.

The operational constraint environment in which these investigations are being conducted is severe and must be assessed in full to understand what the OTP can realistically achieve.

Access limitations are structural. The absence of direct access to crime scenes constrains the OTP's ability to conduct on-site examinations, recover physical evidence, document forensic traces, and independently verify information. In a conflict where drone warfare, mass killing, and sexual violence have occurred across geographic areas controlled by armed actors that are either actively hostile to the ICC or incapable of providing security guarantees to investigators, the on-site examination methods that form the evidentiary foundation of criminal prosecution are simply not available.

Cooperation asymmetry is acute. The OTP submitted four assistance requests to Sudanese authorities during the reporting period. Two received positive responses. One could not be executed due to insufficient information. One remained pending after government offices relocated. This is not a functional cooperation environment. It is a partial and unpredictable cooperation environment in which the OTP cannot rely on timely or consistent institutional support for its investigative activities.

The RSF's non-cooperation is absolute. The most operationally significant actor for the El Fasher investigation — the RSF, whose October 2025 offensive is the subject of active OTP investigation — has failed to respond to repeated cooperation requests despite previous assurances. An armed actor that is currently engaged in the conduct being investigated has no structural incentive to cooperate with that investigation. The RSF's non-cooperation cannot be resolved through diplomatic appeals. It can only be changed through costs — sanctions, enforcement pressure, or international isolation — that the Security Council has not yet imposed at the level required to alter the RSF's calculation.

Witness protection constraints are compounding. The conflict environment makes the safe identification, approach, interview, and protection of witnesses an operational challenge that exceeds the ICC's unilateral capacity. Witnesses in areas controlled by the RSF or by SAF-aligned forces face real and documented risks of reprisal for cooperation with international accountability mechanisms. The OTP's ability to build an evidentiary record sufficient for prosecution is directly constrained by the security environment that the international community has failed to alter through the civilian protection mechanisms nominally available to it.

Drone Atrocity: The Primary Civilian Killing System and Its Accountability Gap

Between January and May 2026, OHCHR documented more than 1,000 civilians killed in drone strikes — representing approximately 80 percent of all conflict-related civilian deaths recorded in that five-month period. This single statistic is the most consequential data point in the current Sudan accountability assessment, and its implications extend far beyond the casualty figures it represents.

The scale of drone-caused civilian deaths reflects not an escalation of an existing tactic but the establishment of drone warfare as the dominant modality of civilian population targeting in the current conflict phase. A conflict in which 80 percent of documented civilian deaths are attributable to drone strikes is a conflict in which the primary weapon system being deployed against civilians is remote, technologically sophisticated, and supplied from outside the country. This is not a characterisation of a security force using available weapons imprecisely. It is a characterisation of a systematic targeting system whose primary recorded output is civilian death.

The accountability gap created by drone warfare is structural and must be addressed explicitly in the Security Council's July deliberations.

Attribution of individual drone strikes requires technical evidence — flight path data, communications intercepts, satellite imagery, signals intelligence — that is not available to standard humanitarian monitoring mechanisms and that the OTP cannot obtain in the current access environment. When a drone strike kills civilians in a contested or RSF-controlled area of Darfur, the documentation pathway from incident to evidence to prosecution is broken at multiple points simultaneously.

The arms embargo applicable to Darfur under existing Security Council resolutions covers weapons transferred to the conflict zone. The drone systems currently being deployed were not contemplated in the embargo's original design architecture. The Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights has explicitly called for full compliance with the arms embargo and greater efforts to prevent the transfer of drones used in violation of IHL. This call acknowledges what the evidence confirms: the primary instrument of civilian killing in the current conflict is being supplied from outside Sudan, through channels that the arms embargo is not currently configured to effectively interdict.

The external supply dimension of drone warfare in Sudan is both an accountability issue and a political issue. Identifying and publicly attributing the procurement, transfer, and technical support networks through which drone systems used to kill Sudanese civilians reach the conflict zone is a prerequisite for the arms embargo compliance action that the Deputy High Commissioner has called for. The Security Council's July deliberations should address this explicitly.

Conflict-Related Sexual Violence: Unprecedented Scale, Systemic Deployment

The Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights' characterisation of the CRSV in Sudan as unprecedented in scale and brutality — encompassing gang rape, sexual torture, and sexual enslavement — reflects an evidentiary record whose gravity has not yet produced international responses commensurate with its documented severity.

CRSV as a weapon of war in the Sudan conflict has been deployed with characteristics that place it unambiguously within the legal definition of crimes against humanity: it is widespread, it is systematic, it is targeted against civilian populations, and it is used as an instrument of ethnic targeting and political terror. The FFM's June 2026 findings confirm that these patterns show no sign of abating and may amount to crimes against humanity under international law. This is not a legal speculation. It is an evidence-based assessment by a fact-finding body established by the Human Rights Council specifically to document the conflict's violations.

The OTP's prioritisation of gender-based crime investigations in the El Geneina context reflects the evidentiary record available from that theatre and the broader pattern recognition that CRSV is a central, not peripheral, feature of the atrocity campaign being investigated. For the El Fasher investigation, the documentation of CRSV in the context of the October 2025 offensive will be among the most legally significant elements of any eventual prosecution — both for its intrinsic gravity and for what it establishes about the systematic character of the conduct being investigated.

The accountability gap for CRSV is compounded by the same access and cooperation constraints that limit the broader investigation. Survivors of sexual violence in conflict environments face protection risks from disclosure that are particularly acute in communities where armed actors retain physical control and where social stigma compounds the trauma of the original violation. The OTP's ability to interview survivors, preserve testimony, and build a legally sufficient evidentiary record for CRSV charges requires witness protection infrastructure and community trust that are extremely difficult to develop in the current operating environment.

The Security Council's response to documented CRSV at this scale should include a dedicated briefing by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict — a step that Council members could take in July to ensure that the full dimensions of this dimension of the atrocity campaign receive the institutional attention their severity demands.

The Four Outstanding Arrest Warrants: Twenty Years of Non-Surrender

The four ICC arrest warrants that remain outstanding — against Omar Al-Bashir, Ahmad Muhammad Harun, Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein, and Abdallah Banda Abakaer Nourain — represent the most sustained demonstration of the limits of ICC enforcement capacity in the current international legal architecture.

Sudan's obligation to surrender these individuals derives from resolution 1593 and from subsequent ICC orders. That obligation has not been fulfilled under any political configuration of the Sudanese state across twenty years and multiple government transitions. The current SAF-led authorities nominally bear the obligation. Their institutional capacity to fulfil it — even if political will existed — is constrained by the war they are fighting for institutional survival.

The Al-Bashir case is the most politically significant of the four. The former president's continued presence in Sudanese territory — alive, reportedly free, and not surrendered — is the most visible symbol of the gap between ICC mandate and enforcement reality. His surrender to the Court would be the most consequential single accountability development available in the Sudan context. Its continued non-occurrence is a standing demonstration that the resolution 1593 obligation carries no enforcement mechanism capable of compelling compliance against a sovereign state that chooses to ignore it.

The broader strategic implication is that the international accountability architecture for Sudan faces a fundamental design problem: the legal obligations are clear, the mandate is established, the prosecutorial capacity exists, and the Court has now demonstrated — through the Abd-Al-Rahman verdict — that it can complete Darfur prosecutions to a judgment. What does not exist is an enforcement mechanism through which outstanding arrest warrants can be executed against individuals in the territory of a non-complying state. The Security Council is the only body that possesses the authority to create consequences for non-compliance sufficient to alter the cost-benefit calculation of surrender. Its political division has prevented it from exercising that authority consistently for twenty years.

The FFM's Accountability Recommendations: An Action Agenda the Council Has Not Yet Adopted

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) for Sudan's June 2026 findings present a set of accountability recommendations whose specificity and urgency deserve explicit Security Council engagement rather than acknowledgment and deferral.

The FFM's call for expansion of ICC jurisdiction beyond Darfur reflects an evidentiary reality that the geographic scope of the current ICC referral does not capture: the atrocity crimes documented in the current conflict extend beyond Darfur's boundaries, and restricting the Court's jurisdiction to Darfur leaves the accountability gap for crimes committed elsewhere in Sudan without a credible international judicial response. The mechanism for expanding jurisdiction is a new Security Council referral — a step that the Council's current political composition makes unlikely but that the evidentiary record makes legally and morally necessary.

The FFM's call for establishment of an independent international judicial mechanism working in close cooperation with the ICC addresses the gap between what the ICC's Darfur mandate covers, what the Court's operational capacity can realistically investigate at scale in the current environment, and what the volume and geographic distribution of documented crimes requires in terms of evidence collection, preservation, and eventual prosecution. A complementary mechanism — building on the model of structures established in other conflict contexts — would extend the accountability architecture beyond what the ICC alone can provide and create an institutional repository for evidence that might otherwise be lost in an active and deteriorating conflict environment.

The FFM's call for systematic evidence collection and preservation is operationally the most immediately actionable recommendation. Evidence of atrocity crimes in active conflict zones is perishable: witnesses die, disperse, or become inaccessible; physical evidence degrades; digital evidence is deleted or encrypted; perpetrators destroy documentation. The systematic collection and preservation of evidence for future criminal proceedings — through whatever international mechanism is available — does not require Security Council unity. It requires resources, access agreements with neighbouring states, and the institutional will to treat evidence preservation as an urgent operational priority rather than a post-conflict administrative task.

Security Council Dynamics: Political Division as Structural Impunity

The Security Council's political division on the ICC is not a marginal feature of the July briefing's diplomatic context. It is a structural feature of the impunity environment that the Council's referral was designed — but has failed — to eliminate.

The Rome Statute members among Council membership — Colombia, the DRC, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Panama, and the United Kingdom — have expressed strong support for the ICC's Darfur mandate and commended the OTP for its continued pursuit of accountability. Their political support for the Court's independence is genuine and their public statements are consistent with that support.

Russia's position has been persistently hostile to the ICC, characterising the Court as an instrument of selective and politically biased justice. Russia's vocal criticism has hardened following the ICC's March 2023 issuance of arrest warrants for President Putin and Commissioner Lvova-Belova — developments that have given Moscow a direct institutional interest in delegitimising the Court's independence and undermining the political support available to it in multilateral forums. Russia's use of its Council position to obstruct ICC-supportive resolutions and to provide political cover for non-cooperating states is a documented feature of the current accountability environment.

The United States position has undergone a structural shift whose consequences for the ICC's operational capacity extend well beyond the Sudan file. While the US has traditionally supported the ICC's efforts concerning Sudan, the Trump administration's February 2025 executive order authorising sanctions against foreign nationals involved in ICC investigations or prosecutions targeting US citizens or nationals of allied non-Rome Statute states — and the June 2025 sanctioning of four ICC judges — have introduced a dimension of active institutional pressure against the Court that is unprecedented in US-ICC relations. The political signal transmitted to ICC partners, TCCs, and the OTP by US sanctions against sitting judges is that the Court's independence from great-power political pressure cannot be assumed — a signal whose consequences for the Court's ability to function in Sudan and elsewhere will compound over time if the policy is sustained.

For Council members supportive of the ICC's Darfur mandate, the July briefing provides a specific opportunity to demonstrate that the Court retains meaningful political support despite the pressure it faces. A joint press stakeout reaffirming commitment to justice and accountability, an Arria-formula meeting with the OTP, OHCHR, the FFM, civil society, and victims' representatives, and an invitation to the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict to brief the Council on the broader human rights dimensions of the conflict would collectively demonstrate that ICC accountability for Darfur retains institutional support that obstruction and political pressure have not eliminated.

Strategic Scenarios: Accountability Trajectories Through 2027

Scenario 1: Incremental Accountability Progress (Best Case)

• Probability: Low to Moderate.
• Key Conditions: The Appeals Chamber issues its decisions on both the trial and sentencing judgments in the Abd-Al-Rahman case in the first half of 2027, finalising the first ICC Darfur prosecution and strengthening the deterrence signal for ongoing accountability work. The OTP makes sufficient evidentiary progress in the El Fasher investigation to support an arrest warrant application within the next twelve months. At least one Council member introduces a draft resolution calling for expanded ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed outside Darfur, generating a formal Council deliberation that — even if not adopted — publicly establishes the legal and evidentiary basis for expansion. The arms embargo compliance framework is updated to explicitly address drone technology procurement and transfer, creating a legal basis for interdiction of the primary civilian-killing instrument.
• Implications: In this scenario, the accountability architecture makes measurable progress without achieving transformative change. The Abd-Al-Rahman verdict is finalised. A new arrest warrant emerges from the El Fasher investigation. The arms embargo acquires greater contemporary relevance. The Council's political division prevents the most consequential steps — expanded jurisdiction, enforcement mechanisms for outstanding warrants — but the ICC's operational legitimacy is preserved, and its investigative capacity is partially enhanced.

Scenario 2: Accountability Stagnation Under Continued Obstruction (Baseline — Most Likely)

• Probability: High.
• Key Conditions: The Abd-Al-Rahman appeals process proceeds on schedule toward a 2027 decision without producing new accountability developments in the interim. The El Fasher and El Geneina investigations continue under persistent access constraints and RSF non-cooperation, accumulating evidentiary material that cannot be converted into prosecutorial action in the short term. The four outstanding arrest warrants remain unexecuted. The Council's political division prevents any expansion of the accountability architecture. Drone warfare continues at current scale. CRSV continues at documented levels. The FFM's recommendations are acknowledged in Council deliberations and not acted upon.
• Implications: The accountability architecture remains structurally intact but operationally constrained. The ICC continues its Darfur mandate without the political support, enforcement capacity, or operational access required to produce accountability outcomes at a pace and scale commensurate with the atrocity crimes being documented. Impunity for ongoing crimes deepens. The gap between the documented evidence of atrocity and the accountability outcomes available through existing mechanisms continues to widen. The cycle of atrocity and impunity identified as the root cause of the current conflict's recurrence continues unchecked.

Scenario 3: Accountability Architecture Degradation (Worst Case)

• Probability: Low to Moderate, elevated by US sanctions policy trajectory and Russian obstruction.
• Key Conditions: US sanctions against ICC personnel are expanded or escalated, reducing the willingness of states and individuals to cooperate with the Court's Sudan investigations out of concern for secondary sanction exposure. Russia uses its Council position to block renewal of the FFM's mandate or to reduce OHCHR's Sudan monitoring capacity, eliminating the independent documentation infrastructure on which the OTP's evidentiary work partially depends. The RSF consolidates control over El Fasher and other Darfur population centres, making witness access permanently inaccessible for the foreseeable future. The OTP's operational capacity in Sudan is further degraded by access restrictions and the withdrawal of cooperation by Sudanese authorities responding to internal political pressure.
• Implications: In this worst-case scenario, the accountability architecture built over twenty years of ICC engagement with Darfur is progressively hollowed out by a combination of external political pressure, internal operational constraint, and the physical destruction or inaccessibility of the evidence and witness base on which future prosecutions depend. The impunity signal transmitted to the current conflict's perpetrators becomes definitive rather than probabilistic, removing the residual deterrence that accountability uncertainty provides. The long-term consequence is a conflict whose conclusion — whenever it occurs — takes place without meaningful accountability for the atrocities committed during it, recreating the conditions that produced the current conflict's recurrence.

ASA Monitoring Priorities and Early-Warning Indicators

ASA will monitor the following indicators to provide timely assessment of the Sudan accountability environment's trajectory.

OTP investigation operational access. Any expansion or contraction of the OTP's ability to access Sudan and neighbouring countries for witness interviews, evidence collection, and operational coordination will be tracked as a primary indicator of investigation capacity trajectory. Changes in Sudanese authority cooperation patterns — whether positive developments or further restrictions — will be assessed for their implications for the evidentiary timeline of the El Fasher and El Geneina investigations.

Drone warfare civilian casualty trajectory. Monthly OHCHR documentation of drone-caused civilian deaths will be tracked against the January–May 2026 baseline of more than 1,000 deaths in five months. Any escalation beyond this baseline warrants immediate escalation of the atrocity risk assessment. Any evidence of new drone system types, supply chain changes, or geographic expansion of drone operations will be monitored as indicators of the arms embargo compliance environment.

RSF cooperation posture. Any communication from the RSF regarding the OTP's pending cooperation requests will be assessed for its implications for the El Fasher investigation. Continued silence or explicit refusal will be flagged as an indicator of sustained obstruction requiring Council-level response.

Appeals Chamber proceedings in Abd-Al-Rahman. Progress toward the Appeals Chamber's decisions on the trial and sentencing judgments will be tracked as an indicator of the timeline for finalisation of the first Darfur prosecution. Any procedural developments that accelerate or delay the 2027 target will be assessed for their implications for the deterrence signal and the institutional momentum of the Darfur accountability process.

US sanctions policy trajectory. Any expansion, modification, or reversal of the US executive order and sanctions measures targeting ICC personnel will be monitored as a primary indicator of the institutional pressure environment facing the Court. Secondary effects on cooperation by third states and individuals will be assessed as they become observable.

FFM mandate renewal. The status of the FFM's mandate renewal at the Human Rights Council will be tracked as an indicator of the political sustainability of the independent documentation infrastructure on which the OTP's evidentiary capacity partially depends.

Outstanding arrest warrant execution indicators. Any change in the political or security environment that affects the probability of surrender of one or more of the four outstanding warrant subjects — including changes in the Sudanese political configuration, shifts in the SAF's institutional position, or third-state cooperation signals — will be assessed for their implications for the arrest warrant execution outlook.

Conclusion: The Gap Between Evidence and Consequence

Twenty-one years after the first ICC referral on Darfur, the most fundamental challenge facing the international accountability architecture for Sudan remains unchanged: the gap between the documented evidence of systematic atrocity and the consequences that evidence produces for the individuals responsible.

The Abd-Al-Rahman verdict has demonstrated that the gap can be closed — at least partially, at least for individuals who voluntarily surrender to the Court's jurisdiction — through patient, rigorous, and well-resourced prosecutorial work. The OTP's ongoing investigations into El Geneina and El Fasher demonstrate that the evidentiary work continues even under severe operational constraint. The FFM's and OHCHR's documentation of drone atrocity, CRSV, arbitrary detention, and systematic civilian targeting demonstrates that the factual record of current crimes is being built despite the access restrictions that the conflict environment imposes.

What the documentation record cannot build, by itself, is the enforcement architecture that converts evidence into accountability — that arrests the four individuals against whom warrants have been outstanding for up to seventeen years, that compels the RSF to cooperate with investigations into crimes it is currently perpetrating, that interdict the drone supply chains whose output is 80 percent of documented civilian deaths, and that signals to the current conflict's perpetrators that the probability of personal criminal consequence for their conduct is high enough to factor into their operational calculations.

That enforcement architecture requires Security Council political unity that the Council's current composition does not provide. It requires US engagement with the ICC's Sudan mandate that the current US executive policy has replaced with institutional sanctions. It requires RSF cooperation that the RSF has no incentive to provide absent costs it has not faced. And it requires the kind of sustained, consequence-backed multilateral pressure on all parties to the conflict — and on all external actors sustaining it — that the international community has not yet assembled at the scale the evidence demands.

Until that gap between evidence and consequence is narrowed, the accountability cycle in Sudan will continue to produce landmark verdicts for past atrocities while failing to deter the commission of new ones.

African Security Analysis will continue to monitor ICC proceedings, conflict accountability developments, and civilian protection dynamics in Sudan and Darfur independently. Tailored accountability assessments, sanctions monitoring, evidence environment analysis, and strategic risk products on Sudan are available to institutional partners upon request.