Justice and Reconciliation for the Victims of the Khmer Rouge? Victim Participation in Cambodia's Transitional Justice Process

Abstract

This report is the outcome of a research project1 that aimed to understand victims’ perceptions of justice and reconciliation in post-conflict Cambodia and how their inclusion in the transitional justice process has influenced this. This is of particular interest as many resources and hopes have been invested in enabling victim participation to a large degree in the transitional justice process in Cambodia, both at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) as well as in broader civil society projects. As such, this report asks the question: What effect does the inclusion of civil parties at the ECCC, moral and collective reparations, as well as broader civil societal dealing with the past have on the perception of justice and reconciliation in Cambodia? By answering this question, the report provides a more nuanced perspective on various victims’ understandings of justice and reconciliation, how they perceive the transitional justice process and its meaning for justice and reconciliation, what meaning their inclusion in the process has and how it has empowered them, as well as what this can mean for the future. This report draws on a mixed method approach and presents the findings of research conducted across Cambodia from 29 January until 7 June 2018. The mixed method approach began with a survey between January and April 2018 with 439 victims of the Khmer Rouge, selected using stratified random sampling. Respondents included an array of different civil parties, who participated to various degrees in the ECCC proceedings: civil party representatives or focal points, civil parties who testified, civil parties who participated in reparation projects, civil parties from all Cases, and civil party applicants whose applications had been rejected. Furthermore, complainants at the ECCC, participants in NGO projects, as well as people who have not participated in the transitional justice process were included in the survey. In a second step in May and June 2018, we then conducted follow-up, in-depth interviews with 65 of these individuals based on their responses, in order to gain insights on a diverse spectrum of perspectives. This data was complemented by 21 interviews with transitional justice professionals in Phnom Penh between January and March 2018.