COURTESY DISMAL WORLD: A man shows the skulls of Khmer Rouge victims to a boy in Tuolsleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh.
Posted by Douglas Gillison
The Investigative Fund
December 6, 2011
A Swiss judge announces his arrival. His Cambodian counterpart immediately and publicly refuses to work with him.
Today's developments in Phnom Penh showed that things remain as a bad as ever for the UN-sponsored office charged with the investigation of Khmer Rouge crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes.
As I reported in Foreign Policy on November 23, the UN half of the Khmer Rouge tribunal's Office of the Co-Investigating Judges — built to serve the millions of victims of the Khmer Rouge, and arguably the most important court functioning in the world today — collapsed over the course of this year. Its staff walked off the job in the belief that their superior, Judge Siegfried Blunk of Germany, had attempted to illegally whitewash suspects wanted in connection with hundreds of thousands of executions, forced labor, torture, and a policy of deliberately starving the populace.
A Swiss judge announces his arrival. His Cambodian counterpart immediately and publicly refuses to work with him.
Today's developments in Phnom Penh showed that things remain as a bad as ever for the UN-sponsored office charged with the investigation of Khmer Rouge crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes.
As I reported in Foreign Policy on November 23, the UN half of the Khmer Rouge tribunal's Office of the Co-Investigating Judges — built to serve the millions of victims of the Khmer Rouge, and arguably the most important court functioning in the world today — collapsed over the course of this year. Its staff walked off the job in the belief that their superior, Judge Siegfried Blunk of Germany, had attempted to illegally whitewash suspects wanted in connection with hundreds of thousands of executions, forced labor, torture, and a policy of deliberately starving the populace.
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