Cambodian Children's Fund -- Images

As a followup to Jacquie's post about the Cambodian Children's Fund, we thought we'd provide a little imagery.

Cambodian Children's Fund

Today we met with the incredible group of people at the Cambodian Children’s Fund (CCF). This organization serves children who are found scavenging in Phnom Penh’s landfills and dumps for their livelihoods. It takes them out of the landfills and offers them medical care, education, vocational training, song and dance classes and most importantly housing at their three CCF facilities throughout the city. The children here range from infants to 18 year of age and arrive having suffered disease, malnutrition, abandonment and a number of other heartbreaking conditions.

CCF’s incredible work is epitomized in the lively persona of their founder- Scott Neeson, who left his career as President of 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures’ to move to Cambodia and start this organization. Neeson visited Cambodia in 2004 and after seeing the conditions of the city’s landfills and dumpsites; he quit his job, sold off his cars and houses and moved to Cambodia fulltime to start CCF.

The beautiful children we met today greeted us with hugs and songs and spent time engaging us in conversations in order to practice their impressive English skills. We were all really moved by the work being done in Cambodia by people like Neeson and his organization. This beautiful country and its courageous people continue to amaze us at every turn.

Civil Party Challenges

One of the more unique aspects of the ECCC is the Civil Party (CP) process, which offers great opportunity for victim participation but also immense practical and procedural implementation issues for the Court. One of our goals is to determine what are the next steps for the Cambodian American diaspora who applied for CP status. CP applicants are represented by both international and national (Cambodian) counsel in court, and are grouped together based on location or subject matter jurisdiction. One practical challenge we need to handle is how to find the right lawyers, who understand the Cambodian American community and can be responsive to its needs. With over 3,000 potential Civil Parties in Case 2, an essential question we have been asking is how to balance fairness, efficiency, and empowerment of victims within the trial context.

Our meetings really illuminated the specific practical and procedural problems that CP status has created. In the first case, there were four civil party groups represented by eight lawyers total, as well as two prosecutors. Questions of equity, due process and efficiency arose as the defense was at times essentially facing five different “prosecution” teams who could be focusing on different charges and presenting varied arguments. Likewise, each witness could be questioned by each individual team of lawyers. Furthermore, there is the looming potential for conflicts when you have one lawyer representing many (often hundreds) of clients with a myriad of crimes suffered. There are also practical questions of how well versed a CP lawyer can be when dealing with such a larger volume of cases, especially when the lawyers may not be engaged on the ground level full time or have longer than a few hours maximum to spend with each client.

We also have a much better understanding of the future of the civil party process in Case 2. The Court will almost certainly decide to limit civil party representation on a day-to-day basis to two lead civil party counsel. These two lawyers will essentially coordinate and represent all the civil party lawyers on a daily basis. If individual CP attorneys feel that it is imperative for them to be in court a certain day, they can submit a specific request to the court. This proposal will limit the number of attorneys in court, the diverging strategies and arguments presented, and the length of the trial to a much more manageable number. There is still the fundamental question of legal voice and adequacy of collective representation before the court, but what is essential is that we find a way to ensure the Cambodian American communities are being represented and heard within whatever Civil party process the court implements.

Victim's Participation- Next Steps

After our visit today to the ECCC, we left with a new sense of optimism as well as a clearer understanding of the direction we should be taking in order to continue to assist the Cambodian diaspora community in the U.S.

At times, assisting their needs and the responsibility we feel to ensure that their voices are heard has been a very daunting task. However, after meeting today with people from the office of the Defense, the Prosecutors office and the Victim’s Unit, we feel that their stories are in the hands of people that are both capable and motivated to ensure that justice is done.

As representatives of the largest submission of expat Cambodians living outside of Cambodia, we serve as both their liaisons to the ECCC, and as representatives who can interpret the undertaking and decisions of the court itself. Our avenue of communication to the victims is essential. To the courageous Cambodians who submitted their stories to the court in order to participate in this very unique process of international justice, we hope to continue to assist you as we gain a better understanding of the court itself as well as the needs of your community.

We can serve as conduits of information to the Cambodian community in the U.S. and ensure they receive accurate and truthful information regarding their role in the ECCC as well as ensure that they receive civil representation in the court and remain active throughout the process.

On the way back from the ECCC, we stopped briefly at Choeung Ek, the Killing Fields, a series of mass graves in which over 15,000 victims of the Khmer Rouge regime were buried. Interestingly, this is one of the first memorials to the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime that we've seen throughout our visit.

Who's Seeking to Participate in ECCC Proceedings?

To follow up on Seth's post, this map -- given to us by the Victims Unit and poorly reproduced here by me -- provides a nice illustration of the extent to which, and from where, victims have provided information through the Victim Information Forms.  As of the end of 2009, nearly 3600 individuals had submitted information as Complainants, and only slightly less applied to be recognized as Civil Parties.  Only a small number of VIFs came from the Cambodian diaspora.  In fact, the forms collected by ASRIC and delivered today -- nearly 200 -- almost double what had been provided from outside Cambodia to date.

It's striking how many victims are seeking to participate in the ECCC proceedings -- that is, become civil parties rather than submit information as complainants.  This means a hugely increased workload for the Victims Unit, which must process these, as well as on the co-investigative judges who must determine whether to accept the requests for civil party status.  It also means that there is considerable interest among victims to help shape the proceedings.  Not everyone is happy with the pressure it puts on the trials, as active victim participation hasn't been the norm in criminal proceedings internationally (or often domestically, for that matter).  But whether it works well or not, the ECCC is helping to underline the fact that, ultimately, international criminal justice must find ways to satisfy the needs of victims.

Meeting with ECCC Victims Unit

We just returned from meeting with the ECCC Victims Unit -- to speak with the staff, discuss with them their role in preparing for the second trial and facilitating victim outreach, and deliver the nearly 200 victim information forms collected from members of the Cambodian diaspora community in the United States. Overall, our impressions were quite positive, and we were impressed with their ability to process the over-7000 victims currently signed up to participate in the trial. More importantly, the Victims Unit staff was quite excited to receive the submissions, and appears more than capable of handling and communicating with victim participants.

With the deadline to file for civil party status in the second trial rapidly approaching, the Victims Unit seems incredibly busy, and is scrambling to facilitate the registrations of hundreds of additional participants before the late-January deadline. Even as we entered our meeting, a large crowd was waiting outside the building to complete victim information forms and register for participation in the upcoming trial. The Victims Unit staff further indicated that they will be making rounds through various provinces over the next weeks to register as many additional victims as possible.

Interestingly, our meeting coincided with the ECCC’s recent announcement that they had concluded their investigation preceding the second set of prosecutions, which should mean that the actual trial will begin by the end of the year. Under Cambodian law, the defendants -- former Khmer Rouge officials -- can only be held before trial for three years, and with the three-year limit rapidly approaching, the court needed to bring formal charges and prepare for trial. This however means that the work of the Victims Units will only further ramp up over the next months as they make sure that all civil parties are properly registered and represented, and all complainants’ information properly (and confidentially) distributed to the prosecution.

More information on the Victims Unit’s work to follow. We are however relieved to have delivered the victim information forms, and to know that they are now in good hands.

Int'l Justice Clinic in Phnom Penh

Over the course of the next several days, we’re going to be reporting on a trip that three students from the International Justice Clinic and I are taking in Cambodia.  (We arrived about an hour ago.)  For the past several months, the Clinic – working with Applied Social Research of Cambodia (ASRIC), an organization founded by Dr. Leakhena Nou of California State University at Long Beach – has been helping victims of the Khmer Rouge tell their stories for the purposes of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (which we call the ECCC but is also known colloquially as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal).  We’re here to bring nearly two hundred of those stories – detailed in the ECCC’s Victim Information Forms, which we and others collected throughout the Cambodian diaspora community in the United States – to the Victims Unit of the ECCC.  We’ll also be meeting with court officials, defense lawyers, and other human rights professionals in Phnom Penh throughout our week. Over the course of the week, we’ll talk about what we’re doing and, more importantly, what we’re learning here.  So stay tuned!