The UN security council should place an arms embargo on South Sudan, and President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar qualify to be sanctioned over atrocities, UN sanctions monitors say.

A confidential report by the UN panel that monitors the civil war for the security council said Kiir and Machar are still completely in charge of their forces and are therefore directly to blame for killing civilians and other actions that warrant sanctions. A copy of the report was seen by Reuters on Monday.

The security council has long threatened to impose an arms embargo but Russia, backed by Angola, has been reluctant to support such action. Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said on Monday he was concerned that an arms embargo would be one-sided because it would be easier to enforce on the government.

The panel asked the council to blacklist “high-level decision-makers responsible for the actions and policies that threaten the peace, security and stability of the country”.

The names of the individuals the panel recommend for sanctions, in the form of an international travel ban and asset freeze, were not included in the body of the report. But a diplomat familiar with the contents told Reuters that a highly confidential annex calls for blacklisting both Kiir and Machar.

A political dispute between the president and Machar, who was once Kiir’s deputy, sparked the two-year civil war. But it has widened and reopened ethnic faultlines between Kiir’s Dinka and Machar’s Nuer people. More than 10,000 people have been killed.

“There is clear and convincing evidence that most of the acts of violence committed during the war, including the targeting of civilians ... have been directed by or undertaken with the knowledge of senior individuals at the highest levels of the government and within the opposition,” the panel wrote.

However, they said the government appears to have been responsible for a larger share of the bloodshed last year.

“While civilians have been and continue to be targeted by both sides, including because of their tribal affiliation, the panel has determined that, in contrast to 2014, the government has been responsible for the vast majority of human rights violations committed in South Sudan [since March 2015],” the panel coordinator, Payton Knopf, told the security council sanctions committee on 14 January, according to prepared remarks circulated to council members.

South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir (bottom left) and South Sudan’s rebel commander Riek Machar (bottom right) attend the signing of a ceasefire agreement in Addis Ababa, February 2015. Photograph: Tiksa Negeri/Reuters

The South Sudan mission to the UN in New York was not immediately available to comment on the report.

UN peacekeepers in South Sudan are also “attacked, harassed, detained, intimidated and threatened” the monitors said.

Last week, a UN report said all sides had displayed a “shocking disregard for civilian life”: among the atrocities, it said entire villages were burnt and crops destroyed to deprive civilians of any source of livelihood. Other abuses included gang-rape, sexual slavery, forced abortion and a sharp increase in the use of children as soldiers.

“The constant attacks on women, the rape, enslavement and slaughter of innocents; the recruitment of thousands upon thousands of child soldiers; the deliberate displacement of vast numbers of people in such a harsh and poverty-stricken country – these are abhorrent practices that must be halted,” said UN high commissioner for human rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, whose office compiled that report along with the UN mission in South Sudan.

The conflict in South Sudan, which separated from Sudan in 2011, has torn apart the world’s youngest country. The UN panel reported that 2.3 million people have been displaced since war broke out in December 2013, while 3.9 million face severe food shortages.



The sanctions monitors’ report described how Kiir’s government bought at least four attack helicopters in 2014 from a Ukrainian company at a cost of nearly $43m.

“They have been vital in providing an important advantage in military operations, have facilitated the expansion of the war and have emboldened those in the government who are seeking a military solution to the conflict at the expense of the peace process,” according to the report.

Knopf told the council that Machar’s rebels were trying to “acquire shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to counter the threat of attack helicopters, specifically citing the need to continue and indeed escalate the fighting”.

Both sides signed a peace deal in August but have consistently broken a ceasefire, while human rights violations have “continued unabated and with full impunity”, the panel wrote.