AU joins South Sudan in push to lift arms embargo

The African Union has called on the international community to lift all forms of sanctions, including an arms embargo on South Sudan, to enable full implementation of the peace agreement. 

The resolution was adopted by the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the AU at its 1060th meeting, held on January 25, 2022, on the situation in South Sudan.

The body said the lifting of sanctions on South Sudan would enable the government to implement the overdue critical tasks of the agreement, including the security arrangement provisions.

“Calls on the international community to lift the arms embargo and other sanctions imposed on South Sudan to enable the country to build the required capacity of the unified armed forces and for them to more effectively discharge their constitutional mandate of defending the territorial integrity of their country,” partly read the resolution.

Embargo renewed

The United Nations Security Council in 2021 renewed the arms embargo on South Sudan and targeted sanctions of travel and asset freezes against individuals for another year until May 31, 2022. 

But it said the Council would review the arms embargo through modification, suspension, or progressive lifting of these measures in the light of progress achieved on the key benchmarks.

It further called on the UN Secretary-General to conduct an assessment of the progress achieved on those key benchmarks encompassing the security arrangement, among others. The report was to be sent to the Council no later than April 15, this year.

Preceding the renewal in May 2021, Amnesty International published a report claiming that the time was not ripe to lift the arms embargo, warning that if such a decision was made, there would be dire consequences attached to it.

“South Sudan’s hard-won independence 10 years ago has sadly not resulted in respect for human rights. “State security forces repress freedom of expression, including media freedoms, and both state security forces and armed groups continue to violate international humanitarian law, in some cases amounting to war crimes, with impunity,” said Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn, and the Great Lakes, Sarah Jackson in 2021.

The UNSC will be expected to decide again in May this year whether to keep or lift the arms embargo and target individual sanctions on certain groups of people.

But the government earlier lamented and said the move delayed the implementation of the agreement, especially the graduation and deployment of the 83,000 necessary unified forces because the forces could not be graduated without arms.

In November 2021, President Salva Kiir called on the Council to lift the arms embargo to enable the government to procure arms for the graduation of the joint forces to take place.

Forces graduation

The schedules for the graduation of the first batch of the necessary unified forces, who have now spent more than two years at various training centres across the country, have failed due to the impact of the arms embargo and financial and logistical constraints, according to the government.

Though several attempts have been made to keep those forces at training centres, it has not been successful as reports by peace monitoring bodies have shown that many trainees have lost hope and are deserting due to unfavourable conditions.