Naushabah Khan MP: speeches

Speeches

• 8 Sept 2026 · Conflict in Sudan · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I urge the Government to listen to his comments and to continue to place that pressure. Egypt is the single largest host of people fleeing the conflict, with about 1.5 million refugees, which places significant pressure on communities and services already stretched thin. At a UNHCR registration centre, I heard directly from Sudanese refugees, including elderly women and young children, some of whom had travelled roughly 1,400 km from the Sudanese border just to register—the same distance as from London to Rome. Their journeys underscore the human reality of displacement. They are not just another statistic; they are families who walked away from everything they owned, because staying had become more dangerous than leaving. Egypt has played a prominent role in stabilising the region, but its ability to manage the crisis alone is reaching breaking point. The question for Britain is not just how much we spend on humanitarian assistance, but whether our support reaches people where they are and where the need is greatest. The registration centre I visited is facing immense pressure: some 4,000 refugees a day against capacity built for 4,000 a month. UNHCR’s Egypt operation has a funding requirement of $133.5 million for 2026, but was only a quarter funded by the end of April, leaving a gap of more than $99 million. That operation is currently receiving no UK funding at all, despite the UK’s own record showing what effective support can achieve. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office-funded North Africa migrant and development project, delivered through the International Organisation for Migration, has reached more than 22,000 migrants and host community members in Egypt since 2024.

• 8 Sept 2026 · Conflict in Sudan · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The medical challenge that people were facing came across strongly in our conversations. We must ensure that aid reaches the right people in the right place in the right way. That point cut through; I hope others will listen to it. Alongside our humanitarian duty, this matters to Britain because the consequences of Sudan’s war are already being felt across the region and beyond. With little prospect of peace or self-reliance in Sudan or the countries hosting its refugees, more people are being forced into dangerous onward journeys towards Europe. Between 2024 and 2025, the number of Sudanese refugees arriving in Europe rose by 232%. In 2025, Sudanese nationals made up 11% of small boat arrivals to the United Kingdom. Funding refugee protection, registration and support for host communities is the right thing to do. It is also how we prevent further displacement and exploitation and stop people being forced to make these journeys later. But funding is only part of the answer. Aid can mitigate the consequences of the conflict, but it cannot end it. However well the registration centre I visited with colleagues is funded, it will still be processing the consequences of decisions made by armed men many hundreds of miles away. Only a political solution can resolve that. The war did not begin as, and has never really been, a contest between two equally matched armies with equally clean records. The Rapid Support Forces are the direct descendants of the Janjaweed militia responsible for the Darfur genocide of the early 2000s, absorbed into the Sudanese state rather than disbanded. When fighting broke out between the force and the regular army in April 2023, it inherited the old militia’s methods along with its personnel. The United Nations fact-finding mission concluded in February this year that the killing of civilians in El Fasher after the city fell to the Rapid Support Forces last October met the legal definition of genocide. Tonight, in a city called El Obeid, the same force is massing outside the walls in very much the configuration that it used in El Fasher. The United States Department of State has already warned that mass atrocities may follow if El Obeid falls too. I want to be clear that the responsibility is not one-sided. Sudan’s regular army has bombed populated areas indiscriminately, and militias fighting alongside it have carried out abuses of their own territory that they have retaken, but there is a difference between that record and what happened at El Fasher. That difference is exactly why the two sides cannot simply be told to agree a ceasefire and be trusted to keep it I raise that history because it explains why calls for a ceasefire keep failing. It is not a dispute that ends with both sides simply agreeing to stop. It also explains why the international effort to end this war has gone almost nowhere. The Quad—the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates—published a peace road map almost a year ago. It has achieved almost nothing, because Saudi Arabia and Egypt want the Sudanese army preserved as the backbone of the state, while the UAE wants its political role dismantled. Those positions were never reconciled, only written around, and Sudan’s own Government formally rejected the road map at the Security Council in February. That rejection barely registered here. Nor is the damage confined to Sudan and Egypt. Chad has closed its borders, after cross-border drone attacks killed its own soldiers. Fighting has spread into Ethiopian territory around the Blue Nile. While the world’s attention is elsewhere, Russia has been negotiating a 25-year naval facility at Port Sudan in exchange for weapons—a foothold on one of the most consequential trade corridors on earth, secured while the country hosting it burns. A war that we are content to fund our way around rather than to resolve is a war that keeps generating problems that Britain will eventually have to deal with on someone else’s terms. As the penholder for Sudan at the UN Security Council, the UK has significant diplomatic leverage. The Government must use it, maintaining pressure for humanitarian troops, for civilian protection, for unimpeded humanitarian access and for a civilian-led political process, including through the Berlin principles agreed earlier this year. That leverage will carry more weight if we are not undercut by our own arms licensing decisions. Evidence from United Nations experts and from Amnesty International has repeatedly linked the United Arab Emirates to weapons reaching the Rapid Support Forces. Hundreds of millions of pounds of UK arms licences to the UAE have been approved during this war. I would welcome the Minister’s assurance that those licences are being tested properly against the risk that British-made equipment will end up fuelling, however indirectly, the same conflict that we are asking the Security Council to end. I also urge the Government to reaffirm the commitment they made earlier this year to the UK’s £146 million of humanitarian funding for Sudan, while extending meaningful funding to organisations on the ground, including for the UNHCR’s work with refugees in neighbouring countries, rather than focusing solely on Sudan itself. Britain has both the means and the diplomatic standing to act. We can help to ensure that people displaced by this war receive the protection and support that they need, while using our influence to address the conflict that forced them from their homes in the first place. Many of them want to return to their home: I heard that loud and clear. I think of the women I met at the registration centre who had walked 1,400 km simply to queue in the baking heat, just to be counted. The least this House can do is make sure that they are not forgotten, and the least that our Government can do is recognise the scale and impact of this humanitarian crisis.