55th Regular Session of the UN Human Rights Council

Item 4: General debate on human rights situations that require the Council’s attention

20 March 2024

Mr. President,

The conflict in Sudan has created the largest internal displacement crisis in the world, and a downward spiral of extreme hunger. According to recent figures, nearly 230,000 children, pregnant women, and new mothers could die in the coming months due to hunger.

Aid organizations have made clear that Sudan armed forces (SAF) are obstructing their delivery of aid to Rapid Support Forces (RSF) controlled areas.  The High Commissioner for Human Rights has noted that the obstruction unfolding may constitute a war crime.

Both parties have perpetrated a litany of other heinous abuses which amount to war crimes. Among them, Human Rights Watch has documented the devastating use of sexual violence in Darfur – where women and girls have been targeted on the basis of their ethnicity and in some cases activism – as well as in Khartoum, particularly by the RSF.

Impunity is a core driver of the current crisis, and the seeming disregard with which international crimes are being committed by all parties. More urgent measures are needed to hold perpetrators to account. This Council’s Fact-Finding Mission has a key role to play in this regard, and we appeal to states to support its work.

Mr. President,

We are deeply concerned by recent developments in Venezuela.

Prominent human rights defender Rocío San Miguel has been held in arbitrary detention since February. After the OHCHR expressed concern over her detention, the government ordered the suspension of their operations in Venezuela. Several members of the opposition have also been detained in recent weeks.

States should insist on the release of all those arbitrarily detained, call for free and fair elections, and urge the Maduro government to comply with the Barbados Agreement. They should insist on the reestablishment of an OHCHR presence in Venezuela and support the continued work of the Fact-Finding Mission, whose mandate is now all the more important.

Thank you. 

HRW

Damage to undersea fibreoptic cables off the West African coast follows suspected Houthi attacks on cables in the Red Sea. Several countries in West Africa have been grappling with large-scale internet outages since last Thursday, following damage to several undersea fibreoptic cables. Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Nigeria and Ghana are among the worst-affected, although internet users as far away as South Africa have also been hit.

The incident coincides with a spate of apparent sabotage incidents affecting cables on the opposite side of the continent. Yemen-based Houthi rebels are suspected of severing undersea fibreoptic cables in the Red Sea late last month, affecting internet traffic between East Africa, Asia and Europe.

The cause of the damage to the West African cables has not been confirmed. Several different cables are affected, including the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3.

MainOne, a Nigerian company, said in a statement that the disruption was “most probably due to environmental factors such as landslides and earthquakes”. It claimed that it could rule out any kind of “human activity” as a cause of the fault, due to the cable lying on a 3km-deep seabed at the point at which the damage occurred.

Economic impacts from the outage are likely to be considerable. Banks were forced to close in several countries, including Nigeria, as they were unable to process transactions. Mobile internet users have also reported slow connection speeds, with knock-on impacts for mobile money providers.

Preliminary estimates suggest that fully repairing the damage will take around five weeks, taking into account the two weeks needed for repair vessels to reach the area where the cables have been severed.

Vulnerability

Undersea telecommunication cables play a critical role in the global economy. Improvements in fibreoptic cable connections across Africa over the last decade have helped internet-based businesses flourish, enabling the growth of tech ecosystems in many countries.

However, these connections are extremely fragile and damage to cables is relatively common. As well as deliberate sabotage, cables can be severed by undersea earthquakes, landslides or volcanic eruptions. Ships dragging their anchors along the seabed are another common culprit for faults. Even shark bites can cause serious damage.

To varying degrees, African countries are particularly vulnerable due to the relatively low density of cable connections to many countries. Several major cable systems extend around large sections of African continent – Google’s Equiano cable, for example, which runs from Portugal to South Africa, was completed in 2022 – but most of these systems have spurs that create ‘landing points’ with only a handful of countries.

Sierra Leone, Liberia and Mauritania, for example, are each connected by a single cable, meaning that any damage can cause a total internet blackout. South Africa, on the other hand, has multiple connections, so that telecom operators can reroute traffic onto other cables in the event of an outage.

Telecoms operator MTN said in a statement that it was making progress in restoring services in West Africa and, in the longer term, is seeking to improve the resilience of its networks.

“We are working with the cable consortiums and partners to enhance interconnection along both the west and east coasts, with further interconnections between WACS and Equiano, and the introduction of the end-to-end connection between WACS on the west coast and EASSy on the east coast,” it said.

An alternative to fibreoptic cables is to use satellites to deliver internet services. Satellite internet, however, generally delivers slower connections at great expense and efforts to scale-up this technology are still nascent. Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service, for example, is currently available in only a handful of African countries, including Eswatini, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda and Zambia. By Ben Payton, African Business