Sri Lankan Judge in Cambodia's War Crimes Tribunal
Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK: Chandra Nihal Jayasinghe chooses his words carefully
to match the difficult task before him. He has just been named as one of
the international jurists to preside over the special tribunal in
Cambodia to try the surviving members of the genocidal Khmer Rouge
regime.
"This is actually a new dimension in the judicial endeavours that I
have been engaged in," Jayasinghe, 62, a Sri Lankan supreme court
justice, said to IPS in a telephone interview from his home in a Colombo
suburb.
Chandra Nihal Jayasinghe
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The confirmation of his name by Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni, this
week, along with the list of other international and Cambodian judges,
marked another milestone in the long and tortuous journey to establish
this war crimes tribunal.
Jayasinghe, in fact, is the only jurist from a developing country
nominated by the United Nations in its list of 13 international judges
and prosecutors to play a role in the Extraordinary Chambers in the
Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), as this special tribunal is officially
called.
The others are from New Zealand, France, Austria, Japan, Poland,
Australia, the Netherlands and the United States.
But the announcement of the judge's names has only added to the many
controversies that already dog the ECCC, starting with the generally
hostile attitude displayed towards it by the Cambodian government of
Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Both local and international human rights groups have fired
broadsides at Phnom Penh's choice of Cambodian judges, named this week,
to participate in this unprecedented legal exercise. Particularly
troubling to Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based rights watchdog,
is Ney Thol's name among the 17 Cambodian jurists.
Ney Thol, who is an army general and president of Cambodia's military
court, "has a bad record on human rights," Sunai Phasuk, HRW's
researcher in Thailand, told IPS. "In one recent case, he denied the
right of the defence to call his own witnesses and to cross-examine the
prosecution's witnesses."
Hun Sen's reaction to such criticism has been predictable. In a
speech delivered recently to a gathering of law students, he attacked
those who questioned Cambodia's choice of the local judges for the ECCC.
The Prime Minister "likened his critics to perverted sex-crazed
animals, among other things", states the Hong Kong-based Asian Human
Rights Commission, a regional rights lobby.
"This tribunal is very important for the Cambodian people who
suffered so much during the Khmer Rouge period," Ny Chakrya, a ranking
member of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, a
Phnom Penh-based non-governmental group, told IPS. "They want to see a
fair and transparent tribunal."
And Ny Chakrya is hoping that such will be the case when the next and
the most important step of this tribunal, the work of the investigating
judges begins.
The current developments come after a 10-year-long bitter debate
between the UN and Hun Sen's regime about the setting up of this
tribunal, which is a unique body unlike the special tribunals
established to try the accused for the crimes against humanity committed
in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
The Cambodian tribunal will have a mix of international and local
judges, with the latter in the majority, unlike the tribunals for Rwanda
and Yugoslavia, which had only international jurists to ensure high
standards of justice.
This was crimes court, being set up in a complex that has over 100
offices on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, will have three chambers: the
pre-trial chamber, the trial chamber and the supreme court chamber.
In addition, there will be a team of investigating judges and
prosecutors.
"We are expecting the judges to come to Cambodia for a meeting in
late June," Helen Jarvis, Chief of public affairs at the ECCC, said
during a telephone interview from Phnom Penh. "Then the co-prosecutors
will begin their preliminary examinations to issue preliminary
indictments."
Thereafter, the investigating judges begin work to examine the
evidence for the cases ahead, she added. "We are hoping that the trials
will begin in early 2007."
And while the trial will help Cambodian victims of Khmer Rouge
brutality to finally get justice, it is also expected to revive
political history embarrassing to the UN, the US, China and the regional
grouping Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which
Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines were
leading members at that time.
Some of them helped the rise to power of Pol Pot, the leader of the
Khmer Rouge, while others propped him up after his regime was driven out
of power by the Vietnamese army.
During the reign of terror by the Maoist Khmer Rouge from 1975-79,
close to 1.7 million people were executed or died of forced labour and
famines in Cambodia. This South-East Asian country, one of the region's
poorest, currently has a population of 11.5 million people.
Pol Pot died in 1998 but other leaders involved in acts of genocide
have survived.
They include Ta Mok, the one-legged military chief who is known as
'The Butcher', and Kaing Khek Lev, or 'Duch', who headed the grisly Toul
Sleng interrogation centre in Phnom Penh, where 14,000 people accused of
being "enemies of the state" died and only 12 inmates survived. Both men
are in jail after being accused by a military court, of war crimes and
genocide.
Others like Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's deputy, known as "Brother Number
Two", Khieu Samphan, former head of state during the Khmer Rouge years,
and Leng Sary, the former Foreign Minister, are enjoying a free life
following an amnesty from Hun Sen.
The Prime Minister, himself, carries the taint of that brutal regime.
He was a member of the Khmer Rouge till he defected to join forces with
Vietnamese troops that drove Pol Pot out of power in 1979. (IPS) |