Human Rights in Sierra Leone - Historical Background

Historical Background

A 2001 overview noted that there had been “serious and grotesque human rights violations” in Sierra Leone since its civil war began in 1991.The rebels, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), had “committed horrendous abuses,” including rape and the amputation of limbs. The report noted that “25 times as many people” had already been killed in Sierra Leone than had been killed in Kosovo at the point when the international community decided to take action. “In fact, it has been pointed out by many that the atrocities in Sierra Leone have been worse than was seen in Kosovo.”

Crimes committed during the war “included severing limbs, forcibly recruiting children into armed groups, widespread rape and coercion of women and girls as 'bush wives' of combatants, burning houses, and killing and maiming of civilians. More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced across the country.”

About one quarter of the soldiers serving in the government armed forces during the civil war were under age 18. “Recruitment methods were brutal – sometimes children were abducted, sometimes they were forced to kill members of their own families so as to make them outcasts, sometimes they were drugged, sometimes they were forced into conscription by threatening family members.” Child soldiers were deliberately overwhelmed with violence “in order to completely desensitize them and make them mindless killing machines.”

Sierra Leone's civil war ended in January 2002 after the U.N. established a large peacekeeping force that helped restore peace and stability. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established, and in 2004 it issued its final report, which included a long list of recommendations intended to remedy “some of the endemic problems that the TRC identified as causes of the war including issues relating to protecting human rights, fighting corruption, the need for wholesale reform of the justice and security sectors, and improving the democratic participation of youth and women.”

In 2004 UN peacekeepers handed security over to Sierra Leone's armed forces and police and were replaced by a UN peacebuilding mission, UNIOSIL, which in 2008 was in turn replaced by the UN Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone (UNIPSIL), which is tasked with monitoring and upholding human rights and the rule of law.

According to Amnesty International, “tability and security have increased in Sierra Leone since 2002.” The government has made efforts to improve human rights on a variety of fronts, establishing “systems of accountability for human rights and humanitarian law violations committed during the conflict, and promoting rule of law and democratic governance,” according to a 2010 report by the International Center for Transitional Justice. Still, the country falls seriously short by most human-rights measures, and the ICTJ notes that despite “progress on its obligations to provide justice to victims of serious human rights violations,” Sierra Leone “needs to work harder” at implementing the TRC's recommendations.

The following chart shows Sierra Leone's ratings since 1972 in the Freedom in the World reports, published annually by Freedom House. A rating of 1 is "free"; 7, "not free".1