Sexual attacks by soldiers, militia members and the police are widespread throughout Sudan's Darfur region, and the authorities often end up accusing the victims rather than investigating the crimes, the UN said Friday.
"Rape and gang rape continue to be perpetrated by armed elements in Darfur, some of whom are members of law enforcement agencies and the armed forces," Louise Arbour, the high commissioner for human rights, said in a 100-page report documenting the abuses. "And the government appears unable or unwilling to hold them accountable."
At a news conference on Friday, a day after she briefed the Security Council on her findings, Arbour said that under current laws, women who bring rape charges "may face prosecution if the prosecution of the rape cases prove unsuccessful."
The report listed a number of cases where that had occurred.
Under Sudanese law, the report said, a pregnant unmarried woman who cannot prove she has been raped can be charged with adultery, a capital crime. To convict a man of adultery, the testimony of four witnesses is required.
The report was an evaluation of a year-old agreement with the UN in which the Sudanese government pledged to ensure that individuals and groups accused of human rights violations were "brought to justice without delay." The report concluded that there was instead a broad "climate of impunity."
Sudan's government has protested past allegations of widespread rape, and Arbour said the authorities refused to acknowledge the problem to such a degree that "the first thing that has to be addressed is for the government to recognize that this is not a fabrication by humanitarian workers."
The report cited an instance when a director of Medicins Sans Frontieres -- Doctors Without Borders -- documented 500 cases of rape in Darfur, and the government's response was to charge him with spying. The charges were dropped, the report said, only after the UN protested.
The majority of the victims were women and girls from displacement camps attacked as they ventured out to collect firewood or traveled on country roads, the report said. Many were gang-raped.
Many women never report attacks for fear of reprisals or out of the knowledge that redress for sexual violence is unlikely, the report said. Police stations often refuse to register complaints and seldom investigate those they do accept.
"Basically we see extremely, extremely poor results in the investigation and successful prosecution of perpetrators of very serious sexual violence," Arbour told reporters. "Rapes and gang rapes continue to be very prevalent by all counts."
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