One of the saddest episodes of Southeast Asian history was the period during the 1970s that witnessed the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The group was driven by a warped ideology, and it perpetrated myriad crimes against the general population. Millions were killed and displaced through a range of atrocities. Decades later, an internationally supported tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, was set up to prosecute the leaders of the group, and it is now ending its work. What are some of the key lessons the global community can learn from this?
The ECCC was created in 2001 by a special agreement between Cambodia and the UN. It is a kind of hybrid court blending international law with Cambodian law covering the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and has a mixed judicial bench with Cambodian and foreign or international judges. Its mandate was to address the egregious crimes relating to Khmer Rouge leaders and senior personnel. While it is generally known that three persons have been convicted, of whom only one is still alive and now serving a life sentence in the country, it is important to emphasise that a key role of the ECCC has been to counter the impunity of Khmer Rouge-related personnel. This is a qualitative rather than a quantitative issue.
The tribunal has played an important role in clarifying the content of international crimes, in particular genocide, war crimes ("grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions") and crimes against humanity. The notion of genocide is based on various specifics that must be proven, in particular, the specific intention to harm a particular group in regard to key violations.
