Cambodia’s United Nations-backed Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal delivered its final verdict on Thursday, upholding the genocide conviction and life sentence imposed on the regime’s last surviving leader.
The tribunal ruled on an appeal from Khieu Samphan, head of state of the murderous communist regime that wiped out a quarter of Cambodia’s population in less than four years in the 1970s.
It is the tribunal’s latest verdict, which cost more than $330 million and prosecuted just five Khmer Rouge leaders, two of whom died during the trial.
“The Supreme Court Chamber finds Khieu Samphan’s genocide arguments unfounded and dismisses them,” Chief Justice Kong Srim said in the lengthy ruling.
The court also upheld the 91-year-old’s 2018 convictions for multiple crimes against humanity – including murder, torture and enslavement – on a “collective criminal enterprise” basis, even though he was not personally involved in all of the crimes.
But it overturned convictions on several specific murder and prosecution charges.
The hybrid court of Cambodian and international judges was set up to try the senior leaders of the genocidal ultra-Maoist regime that had wiped out some two million people through starvation, torture, forced labor and mass executions during its rule from 1975 to 1979.
Regime leader Pol Pot, known as “Brother Number One”, was never tried and died in 1998 before the court was established.
The genocide condemnation relates to the persecution of ethnic minority Vietnamese who are viewed by the Khmer Rouge as treacherous internal enemies.
The chief justice said the charges relate to “some of the most heinous events” during the blood-soaked Khmer Rouge rule.
– Justice –
The frail Khieu Samphan sat huddled in a wheelchair in the dock and listened intently through headphones to the lengthy decision.
Around 500 people packed the courtroom to hear the verdict, including Khmer Rouge survivors, Buddhist monks, diplomats and government officials.
“I want justice for all victims because we have suffered so much. The Pol Pot regime was so brutal,” survivor You Soeun, 67, told AFP.
Alongside Khieu Samphan in the 2018 case, “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea was also sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide and other crimes, including forced marriage and rape.
Both men were sentenced to life imprisonment by the court in 2014 for crimes against humanity in another case related to the forced eviction of Phnom Penh in April 1975, when Khmer Rouge forces herded the capital’s population into rural labor camps.
The only other person convicted by the Special Court was Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, head of the notorious S-21 torture interrogation center where some 18,000 people were murdered.
Like Nuon Chea, Duch died several years after his conviction.
While the tribunal, officially known as the Extraordinary Chambers of Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), has won few convictions, experts say it has done valuable work in promoting national reconciliation.
In previous appeal hearings, Khieu Samphan’s lawyers accused the court of taking a “selective approach” to testimony and applying legal criteria that it could not have known when the alleged crimes took place more than 40 years ago.
