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PHNOM
PENH—After a complicated and sometimes fraught process
of establishment lasting over two years, the
international tribunal into the crimes committed by the
Khmer Rouge may commence trials as early as September.
Kaing Guek Eav (also known as Duch), former head of the
Khmer Rouge’s most infamous torture-and-detention
center, Tuol Sleng, will be the first of the five senior
leaders of the former Maoist group, currently in
custody, to stand trial.
The
consensus is that as day-to-day head of the Tuol Sleng
facility Duch’s culpability is clear, making his a
fairly open-and-shut case.
Although
tribunal staff cautions it is hard to predict time
frames, Duch’s trial is expected to run through the
remainder of 2008 and possibly into early 2009.
KHIEU SAMPHAN, former head
of state for the Khmer Rouge, is escorted to his seat by
security guards to attend the United Nations-backed
tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on April 23, 2008.
Khieu is appealing his detention while he awaits trial
on genocide charges arising from the movement’s rule in
Cambodia in the 1970s. -- CHOR
SOKUNTHEA/POOL VIA BLOOMBERG NEWS
The
tribunal will then try the remaining four: Noun Chea, or
“Brother No. 2,” as he was known in the Khmer Rouge
hierarchy; former Democratic Kampuchea head of state
Khieu Samphan; former foreign minister Leng Sary; and
his wife Leng Thirith, the regime’s minister of social
action.
“Although nothing has been decided, it seems more likely
they will be tried as a group,” said tribunal public
affairs chief Helen Jarvis. “They are being charged with
policy-level crimes they are all accused of being
involved in.”
All five
are currently in detention on charges of war crimes and
crimes against humanity for their alleged roles in the
death by starvation, torture and murder of approximately
1.7 million Cambodians during their brief rule over the
country between 1975 and early 1979.
The
start of trials will go a long way to defusing ongoing
criticisms, particularly from Cambodians, that the
tribunal is too slow and unnecessarily bureaucratic.
Such
criticisms have increased pressure on the tribunal to
get the trials underway, at the same time, ensuring a
fair and impartial process and being careful not to
characterize the five defendants’ exercise of their
right to appeal as “delays.”
IN this May 21, 2008, file
photo, Leng Thirith, a former Khmer Rouge social affairs
minister, looks on during a hearing at the UN-backed
genocide tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The former
female minister of the Khmer Rouge regime lost her
appeal Wednesday for release from pretrial detention by
Cambodia’s genocide tribunal where she is being held on
charges of crimes against humanity.
--AP PHOTO/HENG SINITH
The
health of the five defendants is another pressure. All
are old and many Cambodians fear they could die before
they face justice.
“No one
is ignoring it [the delays], but the problem is how to
break through without losing the integrity of the
judicial process,” responded Jarvis.
“The
lawyers talk about the international standard,” said
Youk Chhang, head of the Documentation Centre in Phnom
Penh, a local nongovernment organization (NGO) dedicated
to studying and documenting the Khmer Rouge’s
three-and-a-half-year rule.
“You
might apply this in Bosnia, where there is hostility
from the local population and difficulty in accessing
the accused. But here it is different. There is support
from local people. You have all the evidence.
“This is
not about the UN’s reputation. It is about the million
of lives lost. It is about people wanting justice after
30 years.”
“In
comparison with other [war crimes] courts, by any
measure we are making great progress,” maintained
Jarvis. “If anything, there is a certain picture of doom
being painted from outside, but I don’t feel that from
inside.”
Many
observers, local and international, agree the tribunal
has made considerable progress given the challenge of
holding trials of this size and complexity in Cambodia
rather than in a third country, as was initially
demanded by the UN as a condition for its assistance.
The
tribunal is a special chamber within the Cambodian court
system. It comprises of local and international judges
and mainly uses Cambodia’s underdeveloped system of
civil law.
“This is
one reason everything takes so long,” said Rupert
Skilbeck, head of the tribunal’s Defence Support
Section. “There is no clear legal process in Cambodia
even for relatively simple cases, let alone for complex
ones [like this].”
Many
hope situating the court in Cambodia will result in a
flow-on effect in terms of improvements to Cambodia’s
legal process.
“We must
have more objectives than just the trial of the Khmer
Rouge leaders,” said Sok Sam Ouen, head of the Cambodian
Defenders Project, a legal aid NGO. “We need a model for
a new court. Future leaders also need to be warned there
is justice in Cambodia.”
However,
international human-rights groups remain concerned the
country’s underdeveloped judiciary and endemic levels of
corruption could negatively influence the proceedings.
The
clearest example of this, these groups claim, were
allegations of serious flaws in hiring and other
personnel practices, including even senior staff having
to kickback part of their salaries to unnamed
individuals.
Although
a UN audit of the tribunal found no “conclusive
evidence” of kickbacks, the allegations continue to dog
the tribunal and, until recently, have been a barrier to
donor funding.
“It is
not a matter of whether corruption is bad,” said Sara
Colm, a Phnom Penh-based senior researcher with Human
Rights Watch. “The possibility that there is corruption
in the court opens the door to political manipulation
for what should be a squeaky clean process.”
“The
allegations were unspecified, unsourced and
unsubstantiated and they remain so nearly two years
down the track,” is Jarvis’s response. “Some criticisms
were made about aspects of the tribunal’s management. We
have embraced these unreservedly and have made changes.
Although
staff maintains that everything is on track for a
September trial, the tribunal faces other challenges,
including a financial shortfall of nearly $44 million
under a revised budget that nearly doubles the amount of
money sought from donors and the Cambodian government.
The
tribunal’s administrators say they are confident of
securing the funding.
The
tribunal, held in Khmer, English and French, is
struggling to deal with a major backlog of translation
work.
“The
problem is the sheer volume of information the
prosecution has relied on that has not been translated,”
said Skilbeck. “If it is important enough to be used in
the trial the defense lawyers should know what it says.”
It is
particularly acute in relation to material being
translated from Khmer to French, a major issue for the
Francophone legal teams representing Duch and Khieu
Samphan.
“Only 1
percent of the material they need has been translated
into French,” he said. “There is a real concern it could
delay the trial.”
Concerns
have also been expressed about the tribunal’s procedures
for witness which, Colm maintains, are “very faulty.”
“The UN
takes care of witnesses while they are in the compound,”
she said. “Outside, it is under the control of the
ministry of interior judicial police who are rights
abusers themselves.”
“We have
in place a Witness and Expert Support Unit and take this
issue very seriously,” said Jarvis.
“Although the nature of the work limits what we can say
in public about this, we can say it is more than just
physical protection. It includes financial and legal
support and counseling.” |
