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!