Sudan Disappears Women Journalists, South Sudan Schedules Elections, Cuba Frees Teen Political Prisoner, and more.

HRF is gravely concerned about the fates of at least eight Sudanese women journalists and activists who have been forcibly disappeared by the genocidal paramilitary rebel group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for nearly five months after organizing a workshop on women’s rights in South Darfur. HRF holds the RSF responsible for their well-being and demands their immediate release. #KeepEyesOnSudan

In February, RSF intelligence officers and armed fighters in Nyala, South Darfur arbitrarily detained journalists Mawahib Ibrahim, Zahraa Muhammad Al-Hassan, Ishraqah Abdulrahan, and Azhhar Abdel Salam, as well as human rights defenders Magda Hassan Ali, Sarah Adam, Dr. Manahil Mustafa Al-Sanousi, and Azdihar Abdelmonem Hamid. The women were taken to unknown locations with no official statement. They have been held incommunicado since then without formal charges.

On June 10, the women’s rights advocacy group Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) Network indicated that no information about the whereabouts and health of the journalists and activists was available. According to @Sihanet, they are among 150 women and girls forcibly disappeared since February who are suspected to be held in several formal and secret RSF detention sites in Nyala. The journalists and activists were targeted in connection with their involvement in a January workshop in Nyala on women’s rights under national and international law. The event, which drew about 25 attendees, had been authorized by permit from the regulatory authority in RSF-controlled areas.

The abductions occurred in a context in which the RSF systematically abducts citizens based on ethnicity and suspicion of collaboration with the Sudanese regime. On June 15, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan said it has documented “a systematic pattern of mass and arbitrary detention by both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF targeting individuals perceived to be affiliated with, or sympathetic to, the opposing side.” The mission accused both sides of “increasingly employing arbitrary detention, torture and enforced disappearance to control the country’s embattled population.”

Election officials in South Sudan have set Dec. 22 as the date for the country’s long awaited first general election since independence in 2011. After five postponements in 15 years amid a protracted violent power struggle between the country’s two rival warlords — dictator Salva Kiir and his former deputy-turned-rival Riek Machar — HRF echoes the grave concerns expressed by the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan earlier this year that conditions for a credible electoral process and vote do not exist.

On Monday, South Sudan’s National Elections Commission (NEC) Chair Abednego Akok Kacuol, a member of Kiir’s ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-In Government (SPLM-IG) party, announced the allocation of $6 million to support preparations for general polls on Dec. 22. He also announced NEC’s acquisition of permanent headquarters and the launch of civic and voter education across the country’s 10 states and three administrative areas.

The unilateral announcements occurred amid ongoing fighting between South Sudan’s military under the control of Kiir and rebel forces in several parts of the country who are loyal to Machar, the country’s first vice president who has been under house arrest on politically-motivated charges since 2025. On Monday, Machar’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM-IO) announced its hostility to the election by threatening anyone carrying out voter registration or campaigns in the territories it controls.

Recurring political disputes between Kiir — who has been in power since South Sudan’s independence — and Machar have plunged the country into recurring armed conflict, including a brutal five-year civil war, which has led to repeated election postponements. In February, the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan concluded that Kiir and Machar are “systematically dismantling” a 2018 peace agreement that ended the civil war.

“Credible electoral processes are unrealistic in a context where civic space is repressed, conflict rages, more than three million people are internally displaced, and key opposition leaders are arbitrarily detained during a politicized trial,” warned the commission’s chair, Yasmin Sooka.