The Associated Press
"This is a scandal! ... This never happens except in dictatorships!" - Jacques Vergès, Khieu Samphan's defense lawyerPHNOM PENH: The genocide tribunal in Cambodia abruptly adjourned a pretrial hearing for the former Khmer Rouge head of state Wednesday after his French attorney erupted at judges because the case file had not been translated into French.
The judges later said they would issue a warning to the lawyer, Jacques Vergès, for courtroom conduct causing the hearing's postponement.
Vergès, one of the lawyers representing Khieu Samphan, 76, in his appeal against pretrial detention, has earned notoriety with a client list that includes the former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, the Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and the confessed serial killer Charles Sobhraj.
Vergès stormed out of the closed-door hearing Wednesday, telling reporters that judges had asked Khieu Samphan to find a new lawyer.
"French is an official language of the tribunal. There is not one page of the case file against Mr. Khieu Samphan translated into French," Vergès, speaking in French, told reporters. "I should be capable of knowing what my client is blamed for."
Vergès said he had told the tribunal that its failure to translate the thousands of pages in the case file rendered the proceedings "invalid," and that the tribunal had responded by asking Khieu Samphan to find a new lawyer.
"This is a scandal!" Verges said. "This never happens except in dictatorships!"
Vergès, 83, has known Khieu Samphan since both were active in left-wing student activities in Paris in the 1950s.
The tribunal has charged Khieu Samphan with crimes against humanity and war crimes committed while the Khmer Rouge held power in 1975-79. Approximately 1.7 million people are estimated to have died from starvation, disease, overwork or execution as a result of the regime's radical policies in trying to build a classless agrarian society.
The prosecutors' explanation of the hearing's adjournment was similar to that given by Vergès. "Jacques Vergès has chosen not to participate," said a co- prosecutor, Alexander Bates.
"The pretrial chamber's judges decided to remind" the defendant "that he was entitled to choose a lawyer - another lawyer but this one," Bates said.
Khieu Samphan has been detained by the tribunal since Nov. 19. He is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders in custody.
2 comments:
Hi jacques vergès, do not get angry.
We did not find competent translators who agree to make the job to win the peanuts.
16000 documents to be translated into French for only 100 $, which misery!
au contraire, the KR were the utimate dictators. cambodia is a prime example of its failed policy. why are you defending the tyranny, the killers of khmer people. just open your eyes and see for yourself the whole of cambodia. cambodia is never the same again. only god will see to it.
Post a Comment