What do you do? What do you do?

I’ve been working for the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) for the past few months as a legal associate. Among other things, I’ve been writing legal briefs on certain issues that are before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. So far, I’ve written two such briefs.

The first brief was on the admissibility of torture-related evidence before the Tribunal. You can find it here. Because thousands of pages of documents survive from various prisons, including the notorious S-21, a key question is, should confessions and related information that were almost certainly the result of torture be allowed into evidence.

The second brief I wrote was on the current state of victim participation before the Tribunal. The Tribunal’s rules are heavily influenced by French civil law and for the first time ever, this internationalized criminal tribunal allowed victims to formally join the proceedings as so-called “civil parties.” The role of victims as civil parties has been gradually curtailed both by decisions of the Trial Chamber and re-writings of the Court’s Internal Rules. It was the latter that prompted me to examine the current status of victims before the Court, stating that they could no longer in good faith be considered “civil parties.” You can find the public version of this brief here.