Khmer Rouge tribunal will try former leaders one charge at a time

Sep 22, 2011
DPA

Phnom Penh - The Khmer Rouge tribunal said Thursday it has separated the complex array of charges against the four leaders of the ultra-Maoist movement, effectively dividing their trial into a series of smaller hearings.

The move allows the court to rule on individual charges as the trial proceeds, rather than delivering a single verdict for each defendant after a number of years.

The trial of the elderly defendants, who are charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, is expected to start in 2012. The youngest is 79, and there are fears some might not survive a lengthy hearing.

Court spokesman Lars Olsen said the decision to divide Case Two, as it is known, into a series of smaller trials would help victims to achieve timely justice and would safeguard the rights of the accused to an expeditious trial.

'Experience before other international tribunals suggests that where separation of proceedings does not occur in cases of similar complexity, (tribunals) have occasionally required as long as 10 years to reach a verdict,' Olsen said.

The UN-backed court has long described Case Two as the most complex of its type since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg.

The court will open with the charge of crimes against humanity and the forced movement of people.

Later phases will deal with war crimes and the charge of religious persecution as a crime against humanity, as well as evidence involving work sites, execution sites and security centres.

Assessing the crime of genocide, which relates to the Khmer Rouge's treatment of minority Cham Muslims and ethnic Vietnamese, would also be postponed.

Clair Duffy, a tribunal monitor with the Open Society Justice Initiative, said the result would be a more focused and condensed trial that opened with a portion of the indictment.

'I expect that we'll see a judgment possibly in 12-18 months on the first segment of the trial,' she said, adding that other tribunals had seen their elderly or ailing defendants die without a verdict being handed down.

'So I would say one of the main reasons would be to try and circumvent that if possible,' she said.

The four defendants are Nuon Chea, who is known as Brother Number Two and was the deputy of the late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot; head of state Khieu Samphan; foreign minister Ieng Sary; and his wife, the social affairs minister Ieng Thirith.

The accused are aged 79 to 85 and suffer from various health problems. All four have denied the charges.

Psychiatrists recently concluded an assessment of Ieng Thirith, who is believed to have Alzheimer's disease, to determine whether she is fit to stand trial. A decision is expected later this year.

In its first case, the court last year sentenced the regime's security chief, Comrade Duch, to 35 years in prison after finding him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Duch has appealed his conviction.

The tribunal estimated 1.7 million to 2.2 million people died in less than four years of rule by the Khmer Rouge, which emptied Cambodia's cities as it advocated a rural, agrarian society. The court said 800,000 of those deaths were violent with the rest attributed to overwork, starvation and illness.