ECCC, Case 002/02, Issue 17

Case 002/02

ECCC

Cambodia

English

As the first segment of the trial in Case 002/02 nears its end, the Trial Chamber held documentary hearings on evidence concerning Tram Kak District cooperatives and Kraing Ta Chan Security Center. The Chamber assigned a total of two days to all of the Parties to present key documents within this scope, and it provided a third day for the Parties to make official comments on the other presentations. The OCP provided documents on the living and working conditions in rural cooperatives, the arrests and interrogations in Tram Kak District, the treatment of targeted groups there, and the DK authority structures. The Civil Party lawyers used the occasion to read out five applications from Civil Parties who would not have the opportunity to testify themselves. The Nuon Chea Defense used documents to illustrate arguments that the Khmer Rouge used re-education rather than punishment, that there were in fact no distinctions between ethnic or socioeconomic groups, and that interrogation and torture were used relatively rarely. Khieu Samphan’s Defense team was interrupted as the presentation went beyond the scope of the first trial segment. Those events, as well as a renewed debate over the use of torture-tainted evidence, constitute the primary legal and procedural issues to arise in the courtroom this week, as described herein.