Date: January 2005

Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Report recommends prohibition of all corporal punishment

"Corporal punishment, whether in school or at home, legitimises violence as a means to control behaviour and should be outlawed." This is one of the recommendations of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. The Commission's final report was launched at the United Nations on 27 October 2004 by the then President of the Security Council, Sir Emyr Jones Parry, the UK's Permanent Representative to the UN, together with the Presidents of the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council.

The Sierra Leone Commission is the first to issue a child-friendly version of its report, launched at the same time. Children were actively involved in the work of the Commission and gave evidence at special hearings. At the launch, Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, underlined the importance of children's testimony and recommendations for the future, given their extreme suffering as victims of the war.

The child-friendly version (full text available at www.unicef.org/infobycountry/files/TRCCF9SeptFINAL.pdf) states:

"Children of this country were forced to fight for a cause we could not understand. We were drugged and made to kill and destroy our brothers and sisters and our mothers and fathers. We were beaten, amputated and used as sex slaves. This was a wretched display of inhuman and immoral actions by those who were supposed to be protecting us. Our hands, which were meant to be used freely for play and schoolwork, were used instead, by force, to burn, kill and destroy...

"We were accustomed to abuse and violence. We didn't know that it is wrong for adults to beat and abuse children. That is why the Commission has recommended that corporal punishment be prohibited by law, to help teach children not to use physical force and violence to settle disputes, or as a means of discipline."

Among many other recommendations are that "the rights of children, spelled out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international treaties, should be passed into national law. The Child Rights Bill should therefore be adopted by Parliament without delay and swiftly implemented".

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