SRT Grantee News – October

Grantee news:

• Protection Approaches co-organised and spoke at a global media briefing following the RSF capture of El Fasher, attended by over 100 journalists including from the BBC, AP and The Guardian, resulting in significant coverage. The organisation also issued an emergency alert to civil society, government and media contacts. Following this, UK Labour MP Anneliese Dodds raised an Urgent Question in Parliament on the UK’s response to reported civilian massacres in El Fasher.
• Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has condemned mass atrocities and ethnically targeted killings around El Fasher. MSF teams in Tawila are treating thousands of displaced civilians with severe malnutrition and conflict-related injuries, amid reports of many thousands more being blocked from fleeing, abducted, or executed. MSF is urging the RSF to allow safe passage and calling on international actors to intervene and ensure humanitarian access.
• The Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) called on the UN and the African Union to urgently intervene in El Fasher, including enforcing a ceasefire, deploying peacekeepers, protecting humanitarian workers, halting external arms supplies, and restoring critical aid and health services. SIHA is also supporting efforts to document what it describes as an ongoing genocide by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). You can access the report here.
• K-Monitor and Hungarian Civil Liberties Union took part in a roundtable with former US President Barack Obama on the future of democracy. Sándor Léderer (K-Monitor), Stefánia Kapronczay (HCLU), and Polish civic leader Zuzanna Rudzińska-Bluszcz discussed resisting authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland and strengthening democratic resilience globally.
• An investigation by Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveals that millions in UK climate aid, channelled through the British International Investment, has benefited private firms and shareholders, including luxury car makers and fossil fuel companies, rather than vulnerable communities in developing countries. The investigation forms part of a wider reporting project ahead of November’s COP30.
• In a case supported by The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), French judges have ordered French cement company Lafarge, and several former executives, to stand trial for financing terrorist groups in Syria to keep its plant operating during the conflict. ECCHR has been supporting 11 former Syrian employees in the case since 2016. A separate investigation into Lafarge’s alleged complicity in crimes against humanity remains ongoing.
• Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) in Kyiv, Vasyl Cherepanyn, has been announced as curator of the next Berlin Biennale. He says the exhibition will respond to Berlin’s current socio-political context, drawing on his experience in Ukraine, at a moment when Russia’s ongoing colonial war poses urgent questions for Europe.
• In a case supported by Civitas Maxima, Martina Johnson, a former commander in Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) rebel group, will stand trial in Belgium. It comes after ten years of investigations into Johnson’s alleged involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including mutilation and mass killings, during Liberia’s first civil war, and marks a rare step toward accountability.

• Civitas Maxima is also urging Swiss lawmakers to finalise and implement the long-awaited law criminalising torture as a standalone offence. Despite approving the change last year and its historic role in shaping anti-torture norms, Switzerland still does not formally include torture in its domestic criminal code.