The Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2023 by the United States Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released on Monday says there were no changes in the human rights situation in South Sudan during the year and gross abuses continue unabated.  

According to the report, significant human rights issues included credible reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; enforced disappearance; torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces, opposition forces, and armed militias affiliated with the government and the opposition, and ethnically based groups.

“Harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; political prisoners or detainees; transnational repression against individuals in other countries; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious abuses in a conflict, including unlawful civilian deaths, enforced disappearances or abductions, torture, physical abuses, and conflict-related sexual violence or punishment,” the report says. “Unlawful recruitment or use of children in armed conflict by the government and nongovernment armed groups; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including violence against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, and censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental and civil society organizations.”

The report also cites the inability of citizens to change their government peacefully through free and fair elections; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; serious government corruption; serious government restrictions on or harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations.”

“There is extensive gender-based violence, including domestic or intimate partner violence, child, early, and forced marriage, female genital mutilation/cutting, and other forms of gender-based violence; trafficking in persons and including forced labor,” the report adds. “There are laws criminalizing consensual same-sex sexual conduct between adults, although these laws were largely not enforced; crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons; and the existence of any of the worst forms of child labor.”

“The government did not take credible steps to identify and punish officials who may have committed human rights abuses, despite isolated examples of prosecution for human rights abuses,” the report added.

It also highlights that nongovernment armed groups, including the forces of peace-agreement signatories and other opposition armed groups alike, perpetrated serious human rights abuses, which, according to the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, included unlawful killings, abduction, rape, sexual slavery, and forced recruitment of children and adults into combat and non-combat roles.