The Phnom Penh Post

Attorney-at-law and professional translator Andre Sirois harshly critiques the ECCC's translation resources in a memo recently obtained by the Post.

"One can only be extremely worried at the sorry state of legal translation, and the translation and interpretation in general, at [the] ECCC," Sirois wrote in an undated memo to Michelle Lee, the UN's top administrator at the court.

The tribunal's French-language website is "seriously damaging the image and credibility of the ECCC and its officers at least among the French speaking State Members of the UN," according to Sirois.

Tribunal Director of Administration Sean Visoth assured an ECCC working group last week that the court will soon overcome its daunting translation backlog.

"The judicial offices are taking a number of ameliorative measures," he told "Friends of the ECCC" during a May 8 meeting called primarily to review the court's budget.

Those measures include requiring all documents be filed in Khmer and at least one of the court's other two official languages, as well as clarifying which filings must be made in all three languages.

An indignant Jacques Verges halted Khieu Samphan's bail hearing last week, refusing to participate until all relevant documents were translated into French.

The animated defense attorney threatened to lodge complaints with the UN Human Rights Council and French authorities "to tell them of the contempt with which French is treated before this tribunal."

The judges delayed the former Khmer Rouge head of state's April 23 hearing to an unspecified date. They also issued a warning to Verges.

The lawyer "has abused the processes of the pre-trial chamber and the rights of the charged person," the judges wrote of his behavior. Verges, wearing a traditional French attorney's robe - long and black with a white cravat - claimed the judges had suggested Samphan find a new international lawyer.

Jacques Verges, attorney for Khieu Samphan, insisted thousands of pages of court documents be translated into French before his client's April 23 bail hearing could go forward.