Monica Harding

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. I thank the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Naushabah Khan) for raising the subject, which we should be talking about much more, and welcome the Minister to her place. I declare my interest as vice-chair of the APPG for Sudan and South Sudan, and I refer to a trip undertaken with Action Against Hunger to the Chad-Sudan border to witness the impact of the conflict. I can rehearse the lines I have said over and over again during my time in the House to a range of Ministers: the world has failed Sudan, and the UK must do much more to bring about an end to the conflict and to the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today. In June, with the leader of my party, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), I wrote to the former Prime Minister urging him to use his last hours in office to act to end the escalating crisis in El Obeid, which is at real risk of levels of violence against civilians similar to the El Fasher massacre in 2025. I did not receive a response. Over the summer, El Obeid has seen thousands of people arriving in search of shelter. Foreign Ministers, including here in the UK, have made welcome statements calling for de-escalation and for the warring parties to uphold international humanitarian law, but the situation there continues to worsen. It is emblematic of the situation in Sudan today. In May, colleagues and I visited Chad’s border with Sudan. We found a humanitarian response operating under extraordinary pressure. The town of Adré, which once had a population of 40,000, now hosts an estimated 240,000 people. Chad now hosts more than 1.5 million refugees, the majority of them from Sudan. Chad is one of the poorest countries in the world and is sharing scarce water, land and services with a vast refugee population. But as the humanitarian actors we met on our trip told us continually, the needs far outweigh the resources they have to respond.