The Phnom Penh Post

First of all, this blog has been down for the past few months and posts from earlier this year have been deleted due to some combination of the PPPost site being hacked and our transition to new software. We apologize for these difficulties, which we hope will not be repeated.

In tribunal news today, the court has announced the date of the initial hearing second case – featuring Khmer Rouge Brother No 2 Nuon Chea, head of state Khieu Samphan, foreign minister Ieng Sary and social action minister Ieng Thirith – will open on June 27. At this hearing, according to a document posted on the court’s website today, the parties will submit proposed witness lists and raise preliminary objections, and the lead civil party lawyers will offer initial specifications of the reparations awards they will be seeking in the case.

 So-called “substantive hearings”, featuring witness testimony and oral argument, are likely to begin in August.

The Pre-Trial Chamber at the Khmer Rouge tribunal (ECCC).

In public hearings at the Khmer Rouge tribunal on Friday, the pre-trial chamber judges upheld the extension of pre-trial detention for Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith and Khieu Samphan for a third year after their arrest in November 2007. You can read more about it here, or check out the court's own website to read the full text of the judges' rulings on Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith and Khieu Samphan.

Ieng Sary appears at the court in February to appeal his pre-trial detention (ECCC Pool).

The tribunal announced this week that genocide charges had for the first time been brought against three regime leaders: Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan.

The charges stem from the regime's treatment of Vietnamese and the Cham Muslim minority group.

Brother No 2 Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary, the regime's foreign minister, were informed of the charges during a meeting with investigating judges on Wednesday. Former head of state Khieu Samphan was informed Friday. A meeting with Ieng Thirith, former minister of social action, is scheduled for early next week.

My apologies for playing catch-up on this post. I am just returning from a trip to the provinces and was not around to cover two stories of note:

No. 1: On October 7, the tribunal made public six summons letters, dated September 25 and bearing the signature of International Co-Investigating Judge Marcel Lemonde, requesting that six government officials - Senate President Chea Sim, National Assembly President Heng Samrin, Foreign Minister Hor Namhong, Finance Minister Keat Chhon and two CPP senators – appear at the tribunal to provide testimony “in the framework of the investigation under way against Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and other leaders”.

The following day Prime Minister Hun Sen weighed in, saying the officials' testimony could prejudice the tribunal's second case. Speaking at Chaktomuk Theatre, he said: “These [officials] made the Pol Pot regime collapse, and they adopted the law on the Khmer Rouge tribunal, so if they go as witnesses, it would make the accused persons guilty. How is justice to be done? My main problem is that turning the plaintiffs into witnesses would doom the accused.”

This past Wednesday marked the 30th  anniversary of the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal, which found Pol Pot and Ieng Sary guilty of genocide and sentenced them to death in absentia.

I reached out to a handful of experts while reporting the story and because of space constraints was unable to include many interesting responses in the print version. I am reproducing some below:

Co-Investigating Judges at the tribunal denied a request Friday that they investigate allegations of corruption at the court. The request had been lodged by Nuon Chea's defense team, and was supported by two other defense teams.

The Co-Investigating Judges wrote that probing such allegations was outside their jurisdiction.

"Whilst reiterating their desire for an irreproachable Court, they noted that the primary condition for fair trials is that the judges themselves respect the Law, particularly the jurisdictional limits laid down by their founding documents," according to a release from the court. "Accordingly, they were obliged to note that they did not have jurisdiction, under the 27 October 2004 Law and Internal Rules, to conduct the action requested by the Defence."

Allegations of corruption at the Khmer Rouge tribunal could cause investigative delays and possibly prompt the UN to withdraw its support from the court, defense attorney Michael Karnavas said Thursday.

"We don't know if six months or a year from now, this institution will be present," he told the Pre-Trial Chamber; the "ever-growing issue involving corruption and the courts" may convince donors to pull out of the process.

Thus, he reasoned, the chamber should release Ieng Sary, his aged client, from provisional detention. Karnavas has also argued that the octogenarian's frail health necessitates that he be able to live under house arrest.

After being forced to remove documents from their self-published website, lawyers for Ieng Sary lodged an appeal last week against a recent "Confidentiality Order" from the Co-Investigating Judges.

The Co-Investigating Judges claimed the lawyers were posting documents that, if made public, would compromise the quality of judicial investigations at the tribunal. Lawyers temporarily removed several documents, but said they would fight back. In their appeal, filed March 10, they had tough words for the court. I've posted some of the highlights below:

* "Only by vacating the Confidentiality Order and permitting the Defence to maintain a website throughout the entirety of the ECCC proceedings which posts the Defence team's public filings before the ECCC, will the Pre-Trial Chamber be able to ensure that there is no chilling effect on the right of each party to the proceedings to advocate its interests freely, openly and transparently," co-lawyers for Ieng Sary Michael Karnavas and Ang Udom wrote.

The tribunal's fifth plenary wrapped up Friday, with participants issuing a statement about changes they had made to the court's Internal Rules. Among the amendments was a decision to bar civil parties from making their own legal submissions:

"Specifying that where Civil Parties are represented by a lawyer, it is the lawyer and not the Civil Parties themselves who must make legal submissions before the court," according to the statement. "The amendments do not limit the rights of Civil Parties but instead, modify the manner in which these rights are to be exercised, due to the extremely large number of Civil Parties before the ECCC proceedings, and the impracticability of concluding trials expeditiously if all Civil Parties were allowed to intervene on any matter at any stage of proceedings. These amendments do not apply where a Civil Party is being interviewed, and do not prevent a Civil Party from answering questions put to him or her by the Chamber."

This issue came to the fore in June when Theary Seng, a civil party and the Executive Director of the Center for Social Development, attempted to address the court during a pre-trial hearing for Ieng Sary. Judges ultimately denied her request, but Judge Rowan Downing issued a dissenting opinion.