From Documentation to Reparation: Why Sudan Needs a Victims’ Registry

From Documentation to Reparation: Why Sudan Needs a Victims’ Registry

By Hugo van der Merwe and Clara Sandoval, Global Survivors Fund

This article is part of the Sudan edition of our Just Reparation newsletter, which brings together perspectives from practitioners, advocates, and organisations working alongside survivors of torture and other serious human rights violations in Sudan. This special edition explores ongoing discussions, initiatives, and pathways towards securing reparation for victims of the conflict in Sudan.

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Conflict-related sexual violence has been used as a widespread weapon of war during repeated cycles of conflict in Sudan. While these patterns of violence have been documented mainly by accountability mechanisms, little has been done to acknowledge the experiences of survivors or affirm their right to reparation. As a new wave of conflict sweeps the country, survivors right to a remedy and reparation, and their urgent harms, need to be at the centre of humanitarian, peace and transitional justice efforts. A victims’ registry is one key foundation for centring this work on victims and survivors.

While documenting human rights violations has been accepted as a key element of all aspects of transitional justice, such processes have not consistently been survivor-centred and their role in promoting the right to reparation has only recently become more recognised in transitional justice processes across the globe.

A Victims’ Registry

A registry is a database that systematically, confidentially, and securely records information about victims, individual or collective, including their identities, the harms they have suffered, and other information to facilitate the verification of individuals and collectives as victims of specific violations, including conflict-related sexual violence, and eventually to enable their access to appropriate forms of reparation.

Efforts at documentation are mainly geared towards capturing evidence of violations for the purpose of criminal accountability. While much of the information comes from victims and survivors, the focus is often on identifying the perpetrators and preserving evidence of these crimes. A victims’ registry serves as a complementary instrument to such efforts. Its focus is the documentation, acknowledgement, and preservation of the experiences of survivors, and their harms as rights holders.

Victims’ registries contribute to the realisation of the rights to justice, truth, memory and guarantees of non-repetition. They facilitate the shift from a humanitarian response to a rights-based reparations programme. A registry constitutes one of the key foundations upon which national and international reparation programmes and policy responses are built while also preserving collective memory by ensuring that violations are recorded as part of the historical record.

In many contexts, the failure of establishing a comprehensive registry has led to a loss of historical memory regarding the experiences of victims and survivors and continued uncertainty regarding who is eligible for state reparations. Establishing a registry many years after the violations creates significant challenges in terms of engaging survivors, collecting verifiable information and fulfilling their rights.

Learning from International Experiences

Important global practice has emerged on the use of registries for reparation purposes. Colombia demonstrates what can be achieved when comprehensive victim registration is prioritised. The victim registry established under the Victims and Land Restitution Law now includes more than 10 million recognised victims, among them 49,666 survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. Before the registry was created, estimates placed the total number of victims at approximately 200,000, highlighting the profound knowledge gaps that can exist when such systems are absent. Colombia’s experience further shows that comprehensive victim registration is feasible even in contexts affected by ongoing displacement, humanitarian crisis, and armed conflict.

Important lessons also emerge from Kosovo. Soon after the conflict ended, the Kosovo Rehabilitation Centre for Torture Victims and other civil society organisations began systematically registering survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. Two decades later, this documentation became a critical foundation for the national reparations programme, enabling survivors to prove their eligibility, obtain official recognition, and access benefits. Kosovo demonstrates the long-term value of early registration: information collected close to the time of the violations can remain indispensable many years later when reparations mechanisms are finally established.

Valuable lessons on victim registration have also emerged from Peru, Iraq, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Guatemala, by contrast, demonstrates the consequences of failing to establish a registry early on: decades after the conflict, challenges in identifying victims and providing reparations persist. This highlights the importance of timely victim registration.

Across contexts such as Ukraine, Syria, and Nepal, GSF’s experience shows that early survivor registration is critical to future reparations efforts. In Ukraine, GSF and its partners have registered survivors of conflict-related sexual violence to support a government-led urgent interim reparation mechanism, which provided survivors with financial compensation and medical referrals. This process will continue under the implementation of the Bardina Law, a law that sets up a domestic reparation programme for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, strengthening the foundations for a future national reparations programme for all victims.

The Need for a Victims’ Registry for Sudan

In Sudan, there are already numerous organisations conducting documentation of abuses and working with building databases of survivors in need of urgent support. There are also efforts to ensure that historical cases of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances are effectively documented and this information securely archived. This is happening alongside international efforts by both the United Nations and the African Union to collect and verify information about systematic human rights violations.

Given the widespread commission of conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan, a survivor-centred registration process would create a safe and confidential avenue through which survivors can be recognised and exercise their rights. Yet registries are not an end in themselves. They are a means of facilitating access to reparation. Their value therefore lies not only in acknowledging survivors and documenting violations, but in ensuring that registration translates into concrete reparative or reparation measures capable of addressing at least some of the severe harms survivors have endured.

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