The fractious Khmer Rouge tribunal

The AP has a good account here of the tension within the UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia: It was supposed to be a model for international justice and national reconciliation: a U.N.-backed tribunal to hold trials on one of the 20th century’s grimmest chapters — the Khmer Rouge’s murderous 1970s regime in Cambodia. Eight years after ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

The AP has a good account here of the tension within the UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia:

The AP has a good account here of the tension within the UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia:

It was supposed to be a model for international justice and national reconciliation: a U.N.-backed tribunal to hold trials on one of the 20th century’s grimmest chapters — the Khmer Rouge’s murderous 1970s regime in Cambodia.

Eight years after its creation, however, the multinational panel is riven by suspicion, infighting and angry resignations over whether to try more Khmer Rouge defendants on war crimes charges, in addition to the jailer already convicted and four top officials scheduled for trial June 27.

Critics fear the panel is caving to pressure from Cambodia’s strongman prime minister — himself a former Khmer Rouge cadre — to quash any further indictments, or that the United Nations’ resolve to continue the trials may be waning.

The article includes strong pushback from the UN and others against the notion that the court is succumbing to pressure from Cambodian authorities. But recent precedent suggests that the accusation has merit; prime minister Hun Sen is a master of using UN processes–notably the very large UN peacekeeping mission deployed to Cambodia in the early 1990s– to his advantage.   

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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