One of the most fascinating experiences I had in Cambodia last year was the opportunity to attend a hearing of the long-awaited Khmer Rouge Tribunal. No member of the Khmer Rouge had ever faced an international court for his or her role in the death of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians during the 1975-79 regime. The reasons for the 30-year delay in justice are many - the Cambodian government's unwillingness to air dirty laundry, lack of money, the inability of the United Nations and the Cambodian government to agree on a format for the trials - but in 2003 the court got off to a slow and shaky start. The first pre-trial hearings did not begin until late 2007; rumors of alleged corruption within the hybrid UN-Cambodian court were legion, but unsubstantiated.
John Hall is a human rights law professor at Chapman University who has taken a particular interest in the Khmer Rouge trials. Hall became hooked on Cambodia after visiting the country as a backpacker in the 1990s and has since kept a close watch on the country's search for justice. While visiting Phnom Penh in 2007, he managed to obtain a copy of a damning internal audit of the court that revealed serious flaws in hiring and other ethical issues. Hall published his findings in the Wall Street Journal, compelling the UN to make the documents public and set stricter anti-corruption rules. My story on Hall appears in the current issue of Stanford Lawyer magazine.
When I attended the pretrial hearing of Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's right-hand man, I was struck by two things: the harmless, grandfatherly appearance of the then-81 year old man charged with ordering brutal crimes against his countrymen, and the fierce attentiveness of the elderly people who had come in by bus or taxi from the provinces, dust clinging to their plastic flip flops and thin cotton clothes, clutching the headphones broadcasting the proceedings to their ears so as not to miss a word said against the man they held responsible for their family's deaths. If you'd like to see my February 2008 article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Nuon Chea hearing, you can read it here:
