Microsoft donates 100,000 USD to ECCC in Cambodia

Microsoft Singapore, part of U.S. computer giant Microsoft CorpCK, donated 100,000 U.S. dollars to the U.N. side of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), local media said on Thursday.

"It would be nice if there were more," Helen Jarvis, chief of public affairs at the ECCC, was quoted by the Cambodia Daily as saying.

The fund was put toward the court's general operating budget, ECCC public affairs officer Peter Foster said. "It came with no strings attached," he added.

This is the first donation from a private company to the court, the paper said. The tribunal still faces a budgetary shortfall of nearly eight million U.S. dollars, most of it on the Cambodian side, it added.

After six years of talks, the U.N. and Cambodia agreed in 2003 to set up the ECCC to jointly hold trial of the former Democratic Kampuchea (DK) leaders. Formal trial is expected to begin in mid-2007 and the entire process will take three years at the cost of 56.3 million U.S. dollars.

The DK ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 and was accused of being responsible for the death of 1.7 million people.

Source: Xinhua