The United Nations Security Council is discussing a British-drafted resolution that demands Sudan's warring parties cease hostilities and calls on them to allow safe, rapid and unhindered deliveries of aid across front lines and borders.

War erupted in April 2023 from a power struggle between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces ahead of a planned transition to civilian rule, and triggered the world's largest displacement crisis.

It has produced waves of ethnically driven violence blamed largely on the RSF. The RSF has denied harming civilians in Sudan and attributed the activity to rogue actors. In the first UN sanctions imposed during the current conflict, a Security Council committee designated two RSF generals last week. 

"Nineteen months in to the war, both sides are committing egregious human rights violations, including the widespread rape of women and girls," Britain's UN ambassador, Barbara Woodward, told reporters at the start of this month as Britain assumed the Security Council's presidency for November. 

"More than half the Sudanese population are experiencing severe food insecurity," she said. "Despite this, the SAF and the RSF remain focussed on fighting each other and not the famine and suffering facing their country."

Britain wanted to put the draft resolution to a vote as quickly as possible, diplomats said. To be adopted, a resolution needs at least nine votes in favour and no vetoes by the US, France, Britain, Russia or China.

AID ACROSS BORDERS

The UN says nearly 25-million people - half of Sudan's population - need aid as famine has taken hold in displacement camps and 11-million people have fled their homes. Nearly 3-million of those people have left for other countries.

Britain's draft text "demands that the Rapid Support Forces immediately halt its offensives" throughout Sudan, "and demands that the warring parties immediately cease hostilities."

It also "calls on the parties to the conflict to allow and facilitate the full, safe, rapid, and unhindered crossline and cross-border humanitarian access into and throughout Sudan."

The draft also calls for the Adre border crossing with Chad to remain open for aid deliveries "and stresses the need to sustain humanitarian access through all border crossings, while humanitarian needs persist, and without impediments."

A three-month approval given by Sudanese authorities for the UN and aid groups to use the Adre border crossing to reach Darfur is due to expire in mid-November.

The Security Council has adopted two previous resolutions on Sudan: in March it called for an immediate cessation of hostilities for the holy month of Ramadan, then in June it specifically demanded a halt to a siege of a city of 1.8-million people in Sudan's North Darfur region by the RSF. 

Both resolutions - adopted with 14 votes in favour and a Russian abstention - also called for full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access.