Torture still endemic in Cambodian legal system, US ambassador says

Joseph Mussomeli, US Ambassador to Cambodia.

Phnom Penh - More than a quarter of Cambodian court defendants surveyed reported being tortured or coerced into confession and ordinary people lacked faith in the justice system, US ambassador to Cambodia Joseph Mussomeli said Thursday. Speaking at the launch of an annual judicial review by local anti- corruption organization the Centre for Social Development (CSD), the ambassador said that although the figures showed some improvement, the country's notoriously fraught system was still poor.
"The CSD annual report makes clear what goes on inside Cambodia's courtrooms still falls short of what can be considered procedural justice," he said.
"CSD reported that over 25 per cent of defendants appearing in court claimed to have been tortured or coerced into giving confessions. I note that this ... is the same as reported last year, indicating there has been no significant change."
The Court Watch Project by CSD has come to be viewed as the definitive annual survey of developments in the fledgling Cambodian judicial system since it was launched in 2003.
CSD, which receives funding from a number of donors including Germany and the US, interviewed a wide range of judicial officials, witnesses, lawyers and defendants between October 2006 and September 2007.
Judicial reform of the notoriously corrupt Cambodian system has been earmarked by donors to the aid-dependant nation as a key factor in the country's development after 30 years of civil war.
The report outlined a number of concerns, including poor training of the judiciary, bribery, torture, underfunding, a lack of independence and frequent pre-trial detention of prisoners for terms exceeding the legal limit of six months.
"Not all the news is bad," Mussomeli said, but "on balance ... there remains a good deal to be done before the people of the judicial system will earn the trust of the people of Cambodia."