The UN’s human rights chief, Mrs Mary Robinson, is set to visit a massacre site in East Timor today.
The visit is part of a mission to help form a UN stance on controversial trials over atrocities in the former Indonesian province.
On her second trip to East Timor since it voted for independence in a UN-sponsored referendum in August 1999, Mrs Robinson condemned Indonesia's trials over atrocities in East Timor in 1999 and said she would take her concerns to the United Nations Security Council.
A UN spokeswoman said the former President of Ireland was scheduled to visit Ave Maria Church in the town of Suai near the Indonesian border, where 27 people were killed in a massacre just days after the independence vote.
She also plans to travel to the coastal town of Liquica today to hear the first public confessions from perpetrators of the East Timor violence.
Mrs Robinson is on a two-day visit to East Timor as part of a final trip to Asia before leaving the post of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights office next month. Before coming to East Timor, Mrs Robinson had visited China and Cambodia.
The UN estimates more than 1,000 people were killed in the violence carried out by militia gangs backed by some elements of the Indonesian military.
Jakarta's special human rights court last week delivered the first verdicts in a string of cases linked to the carnage, acquitting a former East Timor police chief and five other security officers of crimes against humanity, and giving an ex-governor a jail sentence far shorter than prosecutors had requested.
The former Portuguese territory was declared formally independent in May this year when UN Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan handed over power to former rebel leader Mr Xanana Gusmao.