Joint Criminal Enterprise at the ECCC: The Challenge of Individual Criminal Responsibility for Crimes Committed under the Khmer Rouge

by Anthony Dinh
— 18 Jun, 2010

The process of bringing an individual to trial for the commission of international crimes is both intuitively familiar and singularly daunting. Punishing individuals for wrongdoing is a common effort among communities and domestic criminal law familiarizes us with the practice of holding persons individually accountable for unlawful acts. In fact, punishing wrongful acts is integral to establishing a sense of justice (retributive, restorative, or otherwise). International crimes, however, represent acts of unimaginable violence that exceed expectations for criminal justice in any ordinary sense. Acts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes invoke the urge for criminal punishment that domestic crimes invoke but the scale, scope, and atrociousness inherent in international crimes render them incomparable. In international criminal law, therefore, the challenge is to mete individual responsibility for acts of inconceivable violence and for which domestic practices leave us ill-equipped…

Cambodia Tribunal Monitor’s Trial Observer posts are written according to the personal observations and opinions of the writer and do not constitute a transcript of ECCC proceedings or the views of Cambodia Tribunal Monitor and/or its partners. Official court transcripts for the ECCC’s hearings may be accessed at the ECCC website.