The Special Court for Crimes of the Maoist Regime issued its latest verdict today, rejecting the appeal of 91-year-old Khieu Samphan. The court has been competent since 2001 to try crimes against humanity committed between 1975 and 1979, when a quarter of the Cambodian population was exterminated. Amnesty: These atrocities “have no expiration date”.
Phnom Penh ( / Agencies) – The court for crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge today issued its final verdict confirming the conviction for genocide against the last living leader of the regime. The Supreme Court chamber rejected the appeal filed by Khieu Samphan, 91, already sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014 and 2018 for crimes against humanity.
With torture, mass executions and forced labor camps, the Maoist regime of the Khmer Rouge killed between 1975 and 1979 a quarter of the Cambodian population.
The court, known as the Extraordinary Chambers in Cambodian Courts (ECCC) and made up of Cambodian and international judges, thus concluded its work. The trial, which has cost more than $330 million, began in 2001 and has prosecuted five Khmer Rouge leaders, two of whom died in the process. The “number one brother” who headed the regime, Pol Pot, was never tried because he died in 1998.
The sentence against Khieu Samphan concerns the accusation of genocide against the Vietnamese minority: the court rejected the argument that the regime was a political movement whose aim was to improve the lives of Cambodians. “Not even resorting to imagination could it seriously be said that the revolution of the Communist Party of Kampuchea was carried out in a benevolent or altruistic way,” says the sentence, using the official name of the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. Among the victims of the regime are 20,000 Vietnamese and between 100,000 and 500,000 Muslims of the Cham ethnic group, who were forced to eat pork in the prison camps.
The 2018 trial, in which Khieu Samphan was tried together with “brother number two”, Nuon Chea – who died in 2019 – also ended with a life sentence for genocide and other crimes. But both had already been sentenced to life in prison four years earlier for the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975, when troops forced the capital’s population into labor camps to build dams and bridges for the regime. The only other person convicted by the special court was Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, head of the infamous S-21 torture center where the Khmer Rouge killed some 18,000 people. He died in 2020.
The ECCC has been heavily criticized for costs, slow procedures and interference by current Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, but experts say it has played a valuable role in national reconciliation. Amnesty International Deputy Regional Director Ming Yu Hah said the ruling “should serve as a reminder that responsibility for the most serious crimes has no expiration date.”
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