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Commission to investigate and report on the “antecedents” of the “conflict,” and this implied it could look well back from 1991. [11] Moreover, the TRC was also charged with addressing impunity, responding to the needs of victims, promoting healing and reconciliation and preventing a repetition of the violations and abuses suffered. This aspect of the mandate had no precise temporal framework. The TRC took it as authority to look at post‐Lomé events. The final report of the Commission discussed the history of Sierra Leone inconsiderable detail, especially the colonial period. It addressed the long‐standing dichotomy between the region surrounding the capital of Freetown, known as the Colony of Sierra Leone, and the enormous hinterland, designated as the Protectorate. The report also attempted to analyse the contribution of the various post‐colonial regimes, which were marked by tyranny and corruption, to the origins of the conflict.
    The TRC Act referred in several places to “victims and perpetrators,” suggesting that these two groups made up the Commission's principal constituency. Special attention was focused on children, including child perpetrators, as well as victims ofsexual abuse. [12] The Commission was also given a role in determining responsibilities, as well as in identifying the “causes” [13] and the “parties responsible,” [14] and here its attention was directed to “any government, group or individual”. [15] The Commission listed the names of those holding positions of responsibility in the various parties to the conflict.
    At the core of the Commission's mandate was the concept of “human rights violations and abuses.” The TRC Act seemed to suggest that these could be committed by individuals as well as governments. Responsibilities could extend, for example, to transnational corporations or private security organisations. [16] Section 6 assigned the Commission to report on “violations and abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law,” arguably a very broad concept. In contrast, the mandate of the South African TRC – a model familiar to the Parliament of Sierra Leone when it created the TRC – spoke only of “gross violations.” According toPriscilla Hayner, the South African TRC was criticised for this narrow perspective, in that this presented a “compromised truth” that excluded a large number of victims from the Commission's scope. [17] The term “violations” is widely used within both human rights law and humanitarian law, but the term “abuses” is rather less familiar. Of some interest within the field of international human rights law is the frequent use of the term “abuse” in a very recent instrument, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa , adopted in July 2003. It uses the term “abuse” in several provisions. [18] The context suggests that the term is used particularly with reference to acts committed by individuals against other individuals, rather than by states. [19] This construction of the term “abuses” is confirmed elsewhere in the TRC Act , which instructs the Commission to consider the acts of any “government, group or individual.” Whether or not the drafters of the Act were aware of the debate in international human rights law about the liability of non‐State actors, they certainly seemed to be of the view that it was not only governments that could breach fundamental rights.
    The broad reference to “human rights and international humanitarian law” had another consequence. The Commission's work was not confined to the classic violations of bodily integrity, such as killings, rapes and other violent crimes, and to crimes of destruction of property or pillage. After some consideration, the Commission concluded that it should take its guidance from the comprehensive enumeration of human rights found in such instruments as the Universal Declaration of