Press Release

The students were given a four-month suspended sentence on Tuesday June 4, for celebrating in university campus the founding of the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement (SPLM).

The students will serve three weeks in jail plus SL 100,000 fine for each one of them. If they fail to pay the fine, they will serve one more month in jail. The same court convicted eight others in absentia with six-month suspended sentences plus SL150,000 fine each. The court subjected eight of the students to three year probationary period for good conduct and behavior. Violating the probationary period will render it possible for the authorities to place the students for 6 months in jail, regardless of their academic rights.

Reliable reports indicate that the students were severely attacked, arbitrarily arrested, and beaten up in the university campus by police and security forces. The students were deeply insulted with this brutal attack and were further tortured in jail before the court convicted them with suspended sentences.

SHRO-Cairo considers, in principle, the authority's intrusion in the students' academic freedom and their arbitrary arrest, torturing, and subjection to trial as very serious violations of the right to peaceful assembly and the freedom of expression, as well as the other human rights and public freedoms of these citizens.

The Organization rejects in the strongest term possible the criminalizing procedure and sentence to which these students were unfairly subjected, which reflects the uncivilized attitude of the authorities, government, police, and court towards academic freedoms and the human rights of students in university campus.

• Sudan Government has completely failed to honor the national and international obligations that realize the right of students to enjoy freedoms of opinion and expression, in accordance with Articles 19 and 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the well-known democratic traditions of Sudan's universities and the other institutes of education.
• The Sudan Human Rights Organization Cairo Branch asks the government to respect the academic freedoms and the rights of students to enjoy student activities without restriction or discrimination.
  
• The Organization affirms the allowance of the government to the ruling party's students to celebrate student activities in university campus without university or authority intervention. The government must stop any discrimination between students by race, region, political affiliation, religion, or any other criteria.
  
• SHRO-Cairo condemns the police and security forces that forced their way onto the university campus, intimidating the students, disrupting their student activity, and beating and arresting many of them before the students' body and university staff.
  The court decision that fined the students with millions of pounds and placed them under police surveillance are completely rejected. The Organization urges the Sudan Judiciary to repeal these unfair sentences that clearly reveal the politicized non-independence of the court.