Navanethem Pillay

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay announced Thursday that the report of the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) between 1993 and 2003 will be made public on 1 October 2010.

“Following requests, we have decided to give concerned states a further month to comment on the draft,” Pillay said, “and I have offered to publish any such comments alongside the report itself on 1 October, if they so wish.”

The mapping exercise and its resulting report are unprecedented in scope, covering ten years and the entire territory of the DRC, not just the war-torn east. The report describes a total of more than 600 incidents in the DRC between 1993 and 2003 in which tens of thousands of people were killed. Most of these attacks were directed against non-combatant civilian populations consisting primarily of women and children. Over 1,280 witnesses were interviewed to corroborate or invalidate alleged violations, including previously undocumented incidents, and more than 1,500 documents were collected and analysed during the two years that it took to research and write the report.

The overarching objective of the DRC Mapping Exercise is “to formulate a series of options aimed at assisting the Government of the DRC in identifying appropriate transitional justice mechanisms to deal with the legacy of these violations, in terms of truth, justice, reparation and reform.”