Greater protections - but no way to access them

Illegal, dangerous routes far outpace resettlement slots from Chad, Libya or Tunisia. Only 1,100 refugees were resettled from Libya in 2023, out of some 60,000 registered by the UNHCR. Sudanese people still have to pay smugglers to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean.

In February 2024, a boat with 42 Sudanese passengers sank off Tunisia. Two were rescued, and the others were reported dead or missing.

According to one of the survivors who spoke by phone to Al Jazeera, 38 passengers, including him, were Masalit from West Darfur, fleeing mass killings, and who ought to have qualified for asylum if they had managed to reach Europe.

In the Global North, some countries, like the United States or France, have shown more openness to granting Sudanese applicants asylum or at least temporary protection status. Since July, the French asylum court qualified large parts of Sudan, including Khartoum and most of Darfur, as suffering “a situation of blind violence of exceptional intensity”, giving applicants from those regions the right to immediate protection in France. Similar decisions have been taken in Belgium and the United Kingdom.

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