Ex Cambodian Khmer Rouge official seeks overturning of genocide conviction

Arguing that there was “insufficient reason” to declare that he was guilty, attorneys for the former Cambodian leader of the controversial Khmer Rouge regime on Monday sought to overturn a 2018 life imprisonment verdict against President Khieu Samphan. At The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the defense team for the 90-year-old ex-head of state for Cambodia argued that his sentence for the genocide against the Cham Muslim minority and Vietnamese people must be overturned as they called into question the inadequate evidence linked to the last surviving leader's original trial. Samphan’s genocide conviction should be overturned, his lawyers argued on 17 August, pleading not guilty on behalf of the leader who ruled Cambodia in the 1970s, according to multiple reports. Samphan was convicted by the international tribunal of genocide for ordering the killing of an estimated 1.7 million people, crime against humanity, and war crimes in November 2018. But his lawyer Anta Guissé on Tuesday argued that the evidence to prove the killings of Vietnamese minorities in Cambodia’s border provinces -- Prey Veng and Svay Rieng was insufficient. And therefore, the crime did not qualify to the level of ‘genocide,’ Guissé told judges, adding that the international tribunal must flip the verdict against the radical communist regime’s boss that ruled from 1975 to 1979. [In this photo released by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Khieu Samphan, center, former Khmer Rouge head of state, sits in a courtroom before a hearing at the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. AP Photo/file] [In this photo released by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Nuon Chea, who was the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologist and No. 2 leader, sits in a courtroom before a hearing at the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. AP Photo/file] Khmer Rouge’s main ideologist [Brother No2] was 95-year-old Nuon Chea, who was also renowned as the Cambodian revolutionary politician and Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea Pol Pot’s right-hand man. While Samphan, then 87, served as the head of state, Chea directed death penalties, torture, and execution for dissent against the Khmer Rouge rule. Cambodia’s holocaust became known after the Cambodian invasion by Vietnam, and the 2018 verdict was pronounced by Judge Nil Nonn, who convicted the two leaders of genocide against Vietnamese and Cham minorities. “Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were top leaders in a regime that forced residents out of the cities into the countryside, where they laboured under brutal conditions in giant agricultural cooperatives and work projects,” The Associated Press reported claiming that the communist Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Samphan sought to wipe out and cleanse religious, financial and social institutions. [In this April 17, 1975, file photo, a Khmer Rouge soldier waves his pistol and orders store owners to abandon their shops in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as the capital fell to the communist forces. The last surviving leaders of the communist Khmer Rouge regime that brutally ruled Cambodia in the 1970s were convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. AP Photo/file] The two prominent leaders were convicted by the UN-assisted court to life in prison after a trial for crimes against humanity, and mass disappearances of Vietnamese and Chams, the muslim minority communities. The crimes against humanity conviction included murder, extermination, deportation, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, persecution on political, religious, and racial grounds, attacks on human dignity, enforced disappearances, forced transfers, forced marriages, and rape, according to the agency. Ex-leader guilty under principle of joint criminal enterprise During the second day of the appeal of Khieu Samphan, the 90-year-old defendant declared guilty under the principle of joint criminal enterprise and was seen perched behind his French defence attorney, who argued that the judges made procedural mistakes in the former leader’s trial. She told the court that the prosecutors had “failed to establish the massive character of the crime,” according to the Associated Press. The latter argued that the judges heard just one witness about the Svay Rieng massacre that claimed the lives of four Vietnamese families, a witness that was “informed of these events, by people whose names she forgot.” “This is why in our appeals brief we concluded that acquittal was necessary for lack of evidence,” Attorney for Samphan told the ECCC’s Supreme Court chamber, as cited by AP. “Lack of evidence because we didn’t know who the perpetrators were, we do not know who executed the families, and we also have uncorroborated hearsay,” she added. Court prosecutors, however, rejected the procedural arguments as they laid stress on the “totality” of the evidence against the defendant, whom they asked to make an appearance on Thursday, the last day from the four-day hearing of the conviction case that was upheld on appeal in 2016. (With AP inputs)

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Ex Cambodian Khmer Rouge official seeks overturning of genocide conviction

At The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), defense team for ex-head of state for Cambodia argued that his sentence must be overturned.

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