Cambodia's genocide trial described as expensive farce

The United Nations' chief legal counsel called for donors to help fund Cambodia's United Nations backed genocide trial. The tribunal is not funded by UN member states but instead relies on voluntary contributions. Since 2006 it has cost around 50 million US dollars a year to run. Now a former high-profile supporter of the UN-backed tribunal says further funding would be a waste of money.

Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch Asia division director

SEN: Brad you were a vocal supporter of the UN backed tribunal before but not now so what changed your mind?

ADAMS: We had very high hopes for this tribunal. For more than 20 years politics had stopped the international community from helping Cambodians bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. There were Cold War politics between the United States, China, the former Soviet Union and Vietnam that stopped it. We thought that the tribunal would be able to bring new facts to the Cambodian people, let them know what really happened. We thought that it would be a chance to create a model court in Cambodia where there would be an independent judiciary and where some of the judges and prosecutors involved would be able to take the skills that they obtained from this process and bring them into the Cambodian courts and try to improve Cambodia's terrible judicial system, which is essentially under the thumb of Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Cambodian government and does its bidding.

Unfortunately none of that has come to pass, it's been a very expensive process, as you said more than 50 million dollars per year, they've conducted one trial which took more than a year. That trial was of a person who had admitted his guilt and still it was dragging on and on to the point that many Cambodians were getting disinterested and losing hope. And now we have a situation where the UN staff of the court want to pursue additional cases, and the Cambodians are blocking it. So the process has become politicised in exactly the way we were hoping it wouldn't.

LAM: Do you think part of the problem might be that the process and indeed the tribunal has been watered down so much that it's no longer meaningful?

ADAMS: It really depends on whether the Cambodian government wants the trial to happen and wants the facts to come out. If they do, then it can be very meaningful. But Hun Sen has made it clear over and over again that he doesn't want the trials, he's said repeatedly he doesn't want them. He has said that it was a mistake to have them, he has said that he hopes they fail. He can't really just pull the plug because of public opinion in Cambodia, so he's doing everything he can to make them less meaningful than they could be. And the consequences that people who were responsible for the deaths of thousands or in some cases tens of thousands remaining free, including possibly some members in his party, which is the main reason most people think that Hun Sen has been trying to block the process.

LAM: But I guess they have to start somewhere and so they're for instance next year hearing from four other quite formally high level Khmer Rouge officials. So that's a good start is it not?

ADAMS: It would be a good end. The problem is it's too late for anything to be credited as a good start because we're years into this and tens and tens of millions of dollars have been spent.

LAM: What would you like to see Brad?

ADAMS: I'd like to see speedy trials of people like Nuon Chea, the former number two to Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister, Khieu Samphan, the President of the Khmer Rouge; these people have a case to answer and they should answer it while they're healthy, alert and alive. And there's a risk that these men are going to die in custody because the process is just dragging on and on. I'd also like to see many more people investigated and indicted, I'd like to see the Cambodian government to cooperate with those investigations instead of trying to block them.

LAM: So why do you think the UN is persisting with this whole exercise if it's such a farce?

ADAMS: Well the UN has a reputational risk here, they actually didn't want to get into this. Kofi Anan tried to stop it, but Australia, Japan and France in particular insisted that the UN participate. Now they've committed themselves to this process and as a former UN staff member I can tell you there's a lot of institutional inertia in the UN and also a lot of covering one's rear end. So that they don't want this to be seen as a failure, and so they keep throwing as far as I'm concerned good money after bad without insisting on high standards. I mean the statement that the UN released with the Cambodian government yesterday said that this could become a model court, which is really shocking because the UN has long been aware that the Cambodian model is the worst model for international justice or hybrid court that has been created thus far.