The Phnom Penh Post

The Rutgers, Newark Law School will host a symposium this Friday, April 2, featuring an extensive panel discussion about the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Speakers will include Khmer Rouge survivor and activist Theary Seng, Fulbright Fellow Randle DeFalco, DC-Cam Legal Associates Jared Watkins and Andrew Diamond, and others.

The panel ("The ECCC: The Issues and Challenges of Prosecuting the Senior Leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime") is part of the larger event "Human and Economic Dimensions of the Law in Asia."

More information about the symposium is available here. If you are interested in attending, RSVP to ruils@pegasus.rutgers.edu. 

Those interested in the ongoing debate surrounding the Armenian Genocide (as well as its implications for modern relations between Armenia and Turkey) would benefit from an event being held at Rutgers Thursday evening. The Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights will launch its Armenian Genocide Project with a lecture from John Evans, former U.S. Ambassador to Armenia.

Armenia has been back in international headlines recently with the recommendation from the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee that President Obama recognize the 1915 massacre of Armenians as genocide. Scholars still debate whether the term is accurate.

As I have discussed a number of times before on this blog, it seems that this debate over the terminology of genocide is constantly resurrected because the U.N. Convention defines it too narrowly.

Cambodian-American academic Sophal Ear, who lost his father and brother to the Khmer Rouge, took to the pages of the International Herald-Tribune last week to attack the tribunal. He lists a number of grievances against the court, including high costs, procedural delays, reforms on civil party participation.

If, after four years and $13 million in contributions to the Cambodian government from Japan, the Europe Commission and others, and $76 million in contributions to the United Nations by more than 21 donors, one guilty verdict is all the tribunal has to show, survivors of the Khmer Rouge may just as well consider justice denied.

The cost of the court is obviously a sensitive issue, given that there are so many other sectors of Cambodian society that could benefit from that level of foreign aid. I spoke with Caitlin Reiger of the International Center for Transitional Justice recently, however, and she argued that much of the funding that the tribunal receives is earmarked specifically for these sorts of proceedings, and therefore wouldn't necessarily be available for other purposes in Cambodia.

Ultimately, Ear questions whether high-minded aspirations for the tribunal were ever realistic in Cambodia's current political context, calling the institution "an international and domestic farce", denouement to "a failed 1993 U.N. exercise in democracy that led inexorably toward authoritarianism".