Human Rights Watch received with great disappointment the news of the inclusion of sweeping amnesty provisions for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the peace accord for Sierra Leone. We are deeply troubled that the United Nations allowed itself to facilitate an accord containing such provisions, which violate international law and the U.N.'s most fundamental human rights principles. That the U.N. would breach these principles in the case of one of the more ruthless rebels groups we have seen is all the more disturbing.

Time and again, the United Nations' experience has shown that peace accords built on impunity are shaky and do not hold. In Angola, for example, six amnesties have been granted as part of the peace process, and each has served as little more than an invitation to further bloodshed and atrocities.

We are aware that you asked your representative to add a reservation to the Lome accord, to the effect that the United Nations would not recognize the amnesty as applying to crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law. We welcome this effort to distance the U.N. from the illegal amnesty, but also urge you to take immediate and decisive steps to make this reservation more than a symbolic gesture.

In particular, we call on you to seek a protocol to the accord, to be signed by both parties, making clear that the amnesty is only for crimes against the state and not for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law. Furthermore, in light of your disclaimer, your report to the Security Council, to be submitted in a few days, should recommend the establishment by the Council of an international commission to investigate atrocities committed during the conflict and to study the possibilities for bringing their authors to justice before the courts of other countries or before an international tribunal for Sierra Leone.

We also urge that you recommend to the Security Council that it maintain all remaining sanctions against the RUF (as per Resolutions 1132 and 1171), at least until the moment when you can certify to the Council the full disarming of the RUF, its full compliance with the provisions of the Lome peace accord, and its full cooperation with efforts to investigate its extraordinarily abusive conduct. Furthermore, we urge you to recommend to the Security Council that UNOMSIL be strengthened with additional human rights monitors and that the present ECOMOG peacekeeping force is reinforced with a U.N. peacekeeping component.

The United Nations will be playing a role in establishing important institutions within Sierra Leone, in particular the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). We urge you to insist on the broadest possible investigative and reporting powers to be given to the TRC, but this should be done while noting explicitly that the TRC is not an adequate substitute for prosecutions. Truth telling can be a powerful form of accountability in countries where abusive forces have gone to great lengths to cover up their crimes. But in Sierra Leone, where RUF members hacked people up precisely so their atrocities could be advertised to others as a tool of terror, truth telling will not be enough; prosecution is the only acceptable solution.

We thank you for your attention to these important matters and, as always, stand ready to assist you.

With kind regards,