Fact Finding Missions

Sierra Leone

In October 2000, CHRI conducted a one-month investigation of the situation in Sierra Leone. CHRI's intervention had initially been planned as a high level fact-finding mission that would dig deep into the problems that Sierra Leone has been grappling with almost since its independence and have, since 1993, themselves in a brutal and draining civil war that has brutally killed or maimed thousands of people and forced many more to flee their homes. As a result of decades of bad governance and conflict, Sierra Leone is considered to be among the poorest countries in the world and remains at the bottom of the United Nation's Human Development Index.

The government of Sierra Leone and the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) formally ended the war by signing the Lome Peace Agreement in July 1999. In exchange for agreeing to relinquish territory they "controlled" to the government and a United Nations peacekeeping force, the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of their forces and their cooperation with an overhaul of the state's security forces and political institutions, the rebels received amnesty from prosecution for the violence they had committed over several years of strife and significant weight and influence in a new government and other state institutions.

The flaws in the Lomé Accord emerged soon thereafter, with the RUF in particular dragging its feet or refusing to comply with its obligations under the Lomé Accord. Security concerns were of paramount importance over this period, relegating critical issues regarding the reform of the constitution and judiciary and the creation of new human rights institutions to the background. The matter of the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of RUF rebels ultimately became a flashpoint, and renewed fighting broke out in May 2000. The rebels pushed once more towards the capital and the abduction of hundreds of UN peacekeepers by the RUF only heightened the tension and put broader international efforts to consolidate peace in the country in great jeopardy.

Given the circumstances, CHRI changed the strategy for its intervention in Sierra Leone. The high-level mission was cancelled and in its place a lower-profile investigation was designed to gather more information about the overall situation and give special attention to a particular issue of some long-term importance for human rights in Sierra Leone. In cooperation with several civil society groups in Sierra Leone, including the National Forum for Human Rights and the Sierra Leone Bar Association, a single CHRI research officer conducted interviews and inspections in Freetown and other areas of the country (specifically Bo and Kenema districts), focusing on the state of the judiciary in Sierra Leone amidst the wider context of continued instability in the country and the necessity of building national institutions grounded in a respect for universal human rights.

Click here for the
Report on the Judiciary in Sierra Leone:
"In Pursuit of Justice"