Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
This was no small issue. The controversy over Cases 003 and 004 cut to a dilemma at
the heart of international justice. While the international criminal courts were all political
creations, serving the interests of the powerful players that established them, it was un-
clear just where the threshold lay. How far could legal standards be politically comprom-
ised before the proceedings lost all value? The ECCC had always been tightly circum-
scribed by politics, its jurisdiction restricted to a narrow historical window and a small
number of defendants. At the same time the UN claimed a moral and political authority
(“the legacy of Nuremberg”) on the basis that it represented universal legal norms. The
problem with legal norms, however, was that they were categorical and absolute. To com-
promise them a fraction was, by definition, to compromise them in their entirety.
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It was a contradiction that Cases 003 and 004 cast into stark relief. The UN and the
donors might be morally justified in sacrificing the two cases in order to save Case 002,
but legally speaking, such a compromise could well call into question the legitimacy of
the entire enterprise. The outcome, one court insider said, would then be “something very
close to what the 1979 trials were, just maybe dressed up a bit better.” If that was the case,
it begged the question: why need the UN and the “international community” be involved
at all? If verdicts were what mattered—and if it was accepted that legal corners could
be trimmed in the process—couldn't Hun Sen do it all more quickly and cheaply on his
own?
The truth is that the court's main backers—Australia, Japan, France, and the
US—wanted it both ways. They wanted credit for bringing justice to Cambodia, but not
if it carried a burdensome political cost. They spoke loftily of the ECCC's example to the
Cambodian legal system, but then pressured the UN to make compromises that reinforced
a pattern of political meddling in the courts. In short, they took a series of messy polit-
ical accommodations and concealed them behind a mirage of justice. That many foreign
officials were personally motivated by a desire for genuine justice did little to alter the
fact that supporting the ECCC was a useful way for Western governments to bolster their
moral credentials while supporting an undemocratic status quo. As the journalist Philip
Short put it in his biography of Pol Pot, “trying the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for
past crimes offers an alibi for doing nothing about present ones.”
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Whatever happened, Hun Sen stood to profit. If the ECCC succeeded, he could take
credit for himself. If it failed, he could blame the UN for yet again abandoning the Cam-
bodian people. Since the court's inception, Hun Sen, the UN, and the major donors had
all pursued primarily political aims. The only difference was that the Cambodians had
never pretended otherwise. This always put Hun Sen at an advantage; unlike the UN and
the donor countries, he was free from the burden of dressing up political calculations in
the language of moral uplift.
