 Can folks hear me? I think that's positioned for John. So since he's the more important speaker, I should leave it that way. Good afternoon. I'm Susan Collins. I'm the Joan and Sanford Wildein here at the Gerald Darford School of Public Policy. And this is an event that I've been looking forward to and that I'm delighted to introduce. It's always a real pleasure to be able to invite a member of our faculty who has a new book to share that book and the work with us. But it's particularly a pleasure as part of our centennial year events when we are showcasing the work that our faculty is engaged with. And so it's really a particular pleasure to be able to hear about hybrid justice, which is work that is joint with John's co-author Ann Heindel. Now, as you may know, John is a Fulbright scholar. He has a Harvard law degree as well as a PhD from Oxford. He joined the Ford School faculty in 2009. And I have to say, he very immediately became a very active member of our faculty. He's a phenomenal teacher. He is a wonderful colleague. And he's been engaged in so many dimensions of the work that's here at the Ford School. His work specializes in international law politics as well as international finance. His recent work focuses on the Asia-Pacific region as well as human rights issues. And many of the courses, he's taught a lot of courses for us. And I'm just going to highlight in particular that he has taught values and ethics and public policy. And he's also teaching a new mini course, the series called Peace Building. And in that course, John and his students use Cambodia and other country case studies in order to explore approaches to reconstructing societies and institutions in the wake of conflict or in some cases in the presence of ongoing conflict. Since 1999, he served as legal advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia. And that has an enormous archive that documents crimes and atrocities of the Khmer Rouge era. He's written lots of articles which are focused using the center's archives and also the legal challenges associated with accountability issues and reconciliation. Well, hybrid justice explores a number of these issues in considerable detail and uses various approaches to make the story real to us and to be able to really highlight some of the issues and implications. More importantly, I think it's important to mention that John's book also furthers the goal of helping the survivors, which is an important objective for the center. And so before we begin, I wanted to thank the Ford School's International Policy Center, in particular, Dean Yang, as well as John, are currently our interim co-chairs. And we are delighted for the work that they are doing related to that. And we thank the IPC for cosponsoring the lecture today. Just a quick note on format. John is going to give an overview of his book and some of the main points. And then we'll take questions from the audience. For those watching online, you're welcome to tweak questions in. Please use the hashtag policy talks. And then after the program, there are copies of the book that will be available for purchase and signing. And so, John, we're so proud of you in your new book. Welcome. The floor is yours. Thanks very much, Susan. Thanks to Cliff and Erin and others who have helped to organize the book talk. I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to share some of our findings from hybrid justice. Now, as many of you know, if you've taken my classes or seen me before, I tend to like to walk around. But on this occasion, to keep myself to time and also to facilitate the video streaming, I'll stand behind the podium. And I'll just offer a few brief remarks. Ann and I were motivated, as Susan suggested, to write this book. By the basic question, how can we help make mass crimes proceedings more effective? Criminal trials certainly aren't the only important facet of transitional justice proceedings and dealing with widespread violence and abuse, but they're important parts of that process in many societies. We decided to focus on one important tribunal. And that's the tribunal created by the United Nations and the Cambodian government to try crimes of the Pol Pot regime. This tribunal was created to hold senior leaders and others who were deemed, quote unquote, most responsible for atrocities between 1975 and 79. And after decades of impunity in that country, the trials gave hope to millions of survivors that some justice would be done and that official acknowledgments and official revelations of suffering would help to foster healing and reconciliation. The Khmerus Tribunal, which has the official name of the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia, you'll hear me refer to it as the ECCC, is part of a family of hybrid courts that mixed national and international laws, procedures, and personnel. Other examples include courts for Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East Timor, Lebanon, and more recently, Senegal. You can think of these as being sort of midway along the spectrum between ordinary domestic criminal courts and fully international ones like the International Criminal Court or the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In hybrid justice, Ann and I are trying to do two things. First, we've tried to give a very thorough account of the origins, nature, evolution, and performance of this particular tribunal, photographed on the cover of the book. But we've also tried to draw a lot of comparisons to other tribunals so that we can generate more general lessons for mass crimes, proceedings, be they fully international, hybrid, or in some cases even domestic. For purposes of today's very brief remarks, I'll focus mainly on the Cambodian Court. Let me say, though, that the hybrid model arose in the late 1990s after the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals had operated for some time due to concerns among some UN member states that the fully international tribunals were too costly, taking too long, and were too removed from the survivor populations such that they lacked both a connection to victims and also some degree of local legitimacy. Mixed tribunals, at least in theory, offered the possibility of having justice that was cheaper, faster, more closely connected to survivors, but with some of the indicia of credibility and legitimacy associated with a UN-led international process. Now undoubtedly, building effective hybrid courts is not easy. The UN and other international actors have entered into these kinds of hybrid arrangement precisely in the types of countries where domestic systems are thought to be lacking. And managing relationships between national and international authorities adds to what is already a very difficult business of adjudicating complex, numerous, and inevitably politically charged cases. The UN was right to pursue justice for Khmer Rouge atrocities, but a hybrid arrangement in Cambodia was undoubtedly going to be a risky enterprise. The negotiations to create the court were highly contentious, with mistrust on both sides between the UN and the Cambodian government, and that led to a compromised solution on a tribunal that had a number of problematic institutional features that have contributed to some serious operational shortcomings. Country context very widely, of course, and there's no single formula for designing and managing hybrid courts, but that said the Cambodian experience can help us to identify some problems to avoid and also some principles to follow in reforming existing courts and in designing and operating new ones. So what I'll do is organize the rest of my brief remarks around a series of eight principles that emerge from our lengthy analysis in the book and that I think should inform the design and operation of future mass crimes proceedings. Principle one pertains to the overall organizational control, specifically of hybrid courts. In general, the UN has insisted on the upper hand and there are good reasons for this. The UN has typically been the principal financial sponsor of hybrid courts and has a fiduciary duty to steward those resources responsibly. The UN also has accumulated institutional expertise in international criminal justice and technical specialists who can assist in the effectiveness of a process. In most cases, the UN also has a somewhat greater political distance from the atrocities in question and although no actor in these contexts is really apolitical, at least the UN has a stronger relative claim in many contexts to a capacity to conduct independent or credible trials. The majority domestic structure that I've described is popular among developing countries because they're concerned about sovereignty and maintaining ownership of the process but there are problems with it. It leaves the UN reputationally and financially liable for processes that they're in which they're too involved to be considered mere technical assistance providers but not necessarily positioned to lead the process decisively and that's been the case in Cambodia where there have been both ownership problems and also repeated instances of relative UN passivity in the face of problems originating on the Cambodian side. Now if we compare this to other hybrid courts in places like Sierra Leone, Lebanon, even East Timor and Kosovo, in each of those instances international appointees had majorities on the bench and occupied many of the key administrative positions. That's not the case in Cambodia where the Cambodian government for a variety of reasons I can address in Q&A had an upper hand in negotiations and was able to secure majority control. In many respects this is the most domestically oriented of the hybrid courts that have been established to date and it's carried with it a number of risks and problems. I mentioned that developing countries see this, many developing countries see this model as attractive and there's no reason to believe that it can't be effective in some contexts but as I'll discuss there are a number of reasons stemming from the Cambodian case to be suspicious of a model that is led by a domestic government and why the UN should be reluctant to commit such resources and to attach its name to a process over which it doesn't exercise a stronger degree of control. The second principle is that justice and efficiency are inextricably intertwined and if you wanna promote justice you also have to prioritize efficiency. At the ECCC only three people have been convicted to date for crimes that resulted in the loss of about 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979. One of the reasons why only three people have been convicted is that there have been a number of different delays in the process since the court opened its doors in 2006. As an aside the three people who have been convicted one, Deuk was the head of an infamous toll slang secret prison in Phnom Penh responsible for torture and interrogation of suspected political enemies and two more recent, two defendants more recently convicted are Q. Sampan who was the nominal head of state in that period and Nguyen Chia who was Pol Pot's quote unquote brother number two or the second in command in the Communist Party of Kampuchea which governed during that period. In fact it's not only that only three people have been convicted it's also inefficiency has led the court to split the second case against Nguyen Chia Q. Sampan and others who have been either severed or who have died over the passage of time because the court was afraid that it wouldn't be able to reach a judgment against these defendants and so instead of having a single large trial against this group of senior leaders the court has decided to have a series of mini trials adjudicating specific alleged offenses the first of which pertain to the evacuation of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and a few other specific offenses. Why is this relevant because if one of the goals and certainly it was one of the expressed goals of this process is to give a sense of official truth and a revelation by an official judicial body of what happened during that tormented period of time severing into mini trials means that we'll get it best a very, very partial view of history that will clearly limit the court's potential impact. The ECCC's inefficiency owes not entirely but in large part to an unnecessarily complex structure. One aspect of that structure is that there's two of everything at this court. In response to Cambodian sovereignty concerns the court has not just one prosecutor but two co-prosecutors, two co-investigating judges, two defense teams for the defendants and obviously that requires coordination and impedes efficiency at some level. An even more significant efficiency challenge arises from the inclusion of investigating judges. This is a somewhat outmoded position that exists in the French civil law tradition on which Cambodia's domestic system is based. An investigating judge shares investigating duties with the prosecutors and it was thought at least theoretically that an investigating judge and the reliance on the civil law tradition which is part of the Cambodian domestic system would allow trials to proceed more efficiently because the judge could conduct a professional and confidential investigation. At the end of that judicial investigation hand the case file to the trial chamber judges who could then conduct a very swift courtroom proceeding before pronouncing on the innocent or the guilt of the defendants. But that wasn't realistic or even desirable from the start. In a mass crimes context like this survivors have a legitimate interest in seeing the courtroom process play out. It was also unrealistic to believe that judges could get a sufficient handle on the enormity of the case file in cases that involve thousands and thousands of alleged crimes and defendants. And so what we've got is sort of the worst of both worlds. A lengthy investigation followed by a lengthy courtroom trial. When I say the worst of both worlds I'm talking about from an efficiency standpoint. The reliance on investigating judges also by the way makes the court very vulnerable to allegations of bias because so much hinges on this confidential investigation by a couple of appointed co-investigating judges. There's also a complex system of appeals in large part designed to adjudicate disputes between Cambodian and international personnel at the courts. And so an issue in theory could be adjudicated first by co-investigating judges then by a pretrial chamber established to deal with disputes between them then by the trial chamber and then by the Supreme Court chamber. This is a terrifically inefficient structure and is partly responsible for the limits of the court's judicial progress to date. These complex features were important at the outset during the negotiations in putting Cambodian officials at ease from a sovereignty standpoint that they wouldn't be forfeiting too much control to the UN. But a very important lesson to draw from this process is that these features can't be replicated elsewhere. The efficiency costs and the fair trial costs of having these duplicative structures far outweigh I think legitimate concerns of sovereignty on the state's part. The third principle relates to the second and has to do with the perils of divided administration. In this court there's a Cambodian and international side of the office of administration and Cambodian and international staffers work figuratively but often also literally on opposite sides of the hallway in separate offices and have to coordinate all of their activities up respective chains of command. They're divided financing divided oversight mechanisms and so that effectively you have a kind of Siamese twin type arrangement inside of what is ostensibly a unified institution. This has had all kinds of problems. It's not only been problematic in terms of efficiency it's also opened the court to risks of inability to deal with problems that arise on either side of that wall. The best example were a series of very credible and well documented kickback allegations on the Cambodian side of the court that the UN had very little power to address because of the structure of the court and the respective reporting lines. In the end the Cambodian government agreed on a compromise solution to deal with corruption which indeed is one of the things that people feared might arise at a hybrid court but it wasn't a very satisfactory one and involved the appointment of a person whose independence and credentials in this area are questionable. Another way in which it's been problematic to have a divided administration is that it leads to at least a possibility of lopsided funding of the two sides of the court and when problems such as the corruption allegations have arisen donors have tended to continue contributing more to the international side and less to the national side and so there have been at least a few periods when Cambodian staffers at the court have gone months without pay. That's a very difficult problem to address in terms of morale. It also leads to difficulties in advanced planning since at least one side of the court is unable to know how many people that it will be able to fund and how lengthy the engagement as a whole will be. Institutional bifurcation also contributes of course to perceptions of politicization and above all it undermines one of the key goals of a hybrid court which is to get national and international personnel together to share expertise and to transfer knowledge. For future proceedings unified leadership administratively is essential and indeed a few other hybrid courts in Lebanon and Sierra Leone have followed the unified approach with greater success. A fourth principle is about procedural rules. This court again in deference to Cambodian sovereignty chose to apply Cambodian rules of procedure but to insert reference to international procedures when there were lecunae in Cambodian rules. This has been very difficult to implement in practice for a variety of reasons the most important of which is that most domestic systems of criminal procedure don't account for the special challenges of mass crimes proceedings and there are lots of examples but among them would be questions about how you handle large numbers of witnesses, time limits, how people are questioned, who has to be questioned in court and out of court and the like. These types of questions simply weren't considered in drafting the Cambodian domestic code and as a result there's had to be repeated reference to international rules and the court has been accused I think with good reason for cherry picking in different instances which rules to apply. Clearly there needs to be some reflection of domestic rules and norms when arranging hybrid courts but it's much preferable to start with internationally tested and operationalized rules and to contour them to local conditions than to begin with wholly inappropriate domestic systems of rules and try to fill in the gaps with international. A fifth principle is that hybrid courts have to address claims for reparative justice carefully. They have to manage expectations and they have to weigh the aims of reparation besides the requirement of a fair and expedient judicial process. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal has the most ambitious scheme to date for involving victims directly in the proceedings and victims unlike in some other internationalized criminal courts are allowed to join as civil parties which you can think of as physically the civil party sits next to the prosecutor but in the US system for example you might have a criminal trial followed by a civil trial. In this particular system civil parties are people who have alleged that they were victimized by the defendant and are able to claim collective and moral reparations as part of the case against the defendant and they enter evidence and they have represented by lawyers in the courtroom. But think about that in the mass crimes context how many potential civil parties there are. This feature was drawn in by judges not by the political architects of the tribunal and in practice it proved extremely difficult to implement in the courtroom. There were four different teams of lawyers representing different groups of civil parties in the first case and very often civil party lawyers and civil parties themselves would make arguments duplicative of the prosecutions very often introducing similar evidence at least arguably prejudicing the defendant's right to a fair and efficient trial. Moreover there was the question of equality equality of arms is just a reference to sort of does each side have sort of a fair stake in the proceedings when lots of people are on one side of the courtroom and simply the defense team is on the other. There are legitimate critiques of civil parties as potentially upsetting this. And in the second court case at the Khmer Rouge tribunal because the number of civil parties is even greater the courts had to streamline their participation reducing them in many ways to a role more akin to observer participants than to direct daily engaged participants in the courtroom. In a way the Khmer Rouge tribunal's modification brings it closer in to line with the international criminal court scheme for involving survivors in the proceedings. And we regard this as a necessary if unfortunate concession to the imperatives of managing a swift and fair judicial process. Another thing I'll mention quickly on victims the idea of promising reparations of some form to victims raised hopes and expectations. Sometimes NGOs interviewing victims further raised those expectations. Many of those expectations were badly dashed when at the end of the first trial the court said this wasn't funded therefore the best we can do is publish online statements of apology by the defendant and mention your names in the verdict. Many defendants saw that as terribly insulting and a really grave injustice. Certainly the court didn't have resources based on the defendant's independent wealth to give financial reparations but victims expected something substantially more than having their names read in the courtroom or in the judgment. And in the second trial what the court has begun to implement is a scheme whereby it grants its seal of approval to NGO funded projects or NGO implemented foreign funded often projects that address civil parties needs. That also raises some complications that I'm happy to discuss in Q and A. But in general mass crimes proceedings have found it very, very hard to address reparative justice as opposed to retributive justice. This one although the most ambitious in its effort to do so has demonstrated more of the limitations of that process than the positive potentialities. The sixth lesson or principle is the importance of measures to safeguard judicial independence both during the design of the tribunals and during the conduct of them. The ECCC has been plagued by a feud over the last several years whereby the Cambodian government from the prime minister on down has publicly asserted that it objects to additional prosecutions. The government's reasons for objecting are dubious at best. The government alleges that additional prosecutions would jeopardize national stability. Also that the prime suspects that are under consideration fall outside of this personal jurisdictional envelope of those most responsible. In fact, the people who have been considered are widely documented to have been supervisors of Khmer Rouge units that were responsible for thousands of deaths and other atrocities. And so the government's arguments appear weak. What's even more troubling is that all of the Cambodian judges, the Cambodian prosecutor, administrators have fallen into line with the prime minister's pronouncements and blocked the movement forward of these additional prosecutions. This interference clearly undermines the perceived legitimacy and independence of the tribunal. And while it's inevitable that at some level in dealing with mass crimes proceedings that political considerations will enter into the discussion of how broad the tribunal's jurisdiction should be, it's very important that the parties that design a tribunal of this kind arrange in advance a relatively sound mutual understanding of what those parameters are and within those parameters grant discretion for the prosecutor to be able to act independently. In this instance, the prosecutors, that the international prosecutor who's trying to bring forward additional prosecutions is clearly not able to exercise independence in the performance of his duties to the extent that we believe is necessary for the court's legitimacy. Seventh and penultimate principle is that these courts have to be designed and staffed to capitalize on natural advantages in outreach and survivor participation. Outreach has been one of the relative strong points of this tribunal. Its in-country location means that it's much better connected to victims than other tribunals that have been situated in the Hague or elsewhere outside of the afflicted society. Hundreds of thousands of people have been able to visit the courtroom and sit and watch proceedings in galleries similar to the one you're seated in now. There have also been lots of programs that connect local civil society organizations to the court to share information about what's happening, media, and other mechanisms for getting the word out about the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Partly for that reason, this tribunal has retained a very strong popular support throughout the years of its existence. That said, one can't take strong outreach programs for granted. In Cambodia, much of the success owes to the fact that there was already a pre-existing civil society network ready to supplement the court's activities. The court itself had very, very small budget and staffing devoted to these activities. And so it's something that needs to be more explicitly designed or built into the mandates of courts going forward. The last principle and one that applies to all mass crimes courts is the design of realistic mandates and then adequate funding and resources to achieve them. The ECCC was sold on the basis that it would have broad transformative effects in Cambodia, effects on justice, on the revelation of truth, reconciliation, capacity building, and even development of a local rule of law. That's an awful lot to ask of a criminal court. And like the Sierra Leone court, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal has been funded primarily by voluntary contributions. I mentioned that there have been delays and uncertainty about the funding, which of course constrains the court's ability to plan for these many and diverse functions. In practice, what happens is that funding tends to be concentrated on what are seen as the core judicial functions, which is holding trials and pronouncing guilt or innocence of the accused. And other functions that are very much part of the court's express justification, such as outreach to victims, counseling survivors, helping to build capacity, serving as a model for the rule of law development, tend to be underfunded. In particular, legacy and capacity building, which is such a core part of the rationale for hybrid courts, has been consistently underfunded in hybrid courts, including the one in Cambodia. In fact, there's no provision in the budget for legacy, except one very small scale training for local defense counsel who are part of the Cambodian teams. There's also no explicit provision in the court's internal mandate documents for capacity building functions. Now it may well be, and Ann and I believe that it probably is, too much to ask a court of this kind to have a robust and extensive capacity building function. But to the extent that that's how it is advertised, and those are the expectations that are raised, certainly needs to be reflected in its mandate and its budget. We do think that this court has had some positive impact on rule of law development in Cambodia. There are features of this proceeding that are very strikingly different than what typically happens in Cambodian courtrooms. For example, there's a zealous defense. There's an organized case file. There's reference to precedence in decisions that are made. There are regular considerations about the rights of the accused and the procedural rules that are in place to protect those rights. And as I mentioned, there are also special mechanisms to account for victims grievances. These are all things that are lacking in the domestic system. And this process, which involves many of Cambodia's senior judicial officials and lawyers, can be instrumental in a small way in helping to translate those practice back into the domestic judicial system. We can also say that this tribunal has had some success in managing its hybrid composition in terms of the jurisprudence that's been issued on most issues. Outside of beyond issues on which the Cambodian executive has taken a strong position, the Cambodian judges, like the international judges, appear to have made a good faith effort to render decisions that are in line with international standards. And so, within a certain envelope or a certain frame that's been established by political leadership on either side, this court has had some important successes. But I think you can see that the overall thrust of our analysis is to look more at the shortcomings of the process. We regard this as an important opportunity for institutional learning. And also that our analysis highlights the importance of including individuals, both in the design and the operation of hybrid courts who have had that past experience and who have had this opportunity to learn from prior engagements, including the one in Cambodia. The ECCC's troubles don't mean hybrid courts are doomed to failure, but they do certainly show us special hazards. The features of any hybrid court will inevitably reflect some of the specific context of the country in which the court is designed. But what we try to analyze and what many of the pages in this thick book are dedicated to is trying to separate out relatively technical, less politicized issues that can be meaningfully addressed and that can help to make these more effective even with the realization that any individual court is going to be subject to some degree to political constraints and pressures. Nobody's claiming that the design or operation of hybrid tribunals or mass crimes trials in general is easy. I was lucky enough to be able to present a very similar set of principles at an unprecedented session of the UN General Assembly last year that considered lessons learned after 20 years of modern international criminal justice. And what Anna and I hope is that the analysis in the book contributes to that conversation in a meaningful way and ensures that lessons from the Cambodian process are taken into account as officials consider how to reform or create new mass crimes proceedings going forward. So thank you very much. So if anyone has questions, just click. At the outset of the process in 2006, the leadership of the tribunal, especially on the Cambodian side, clearly thought of public affairs, there is a public affairs section, clearly thought of public affairs as more akin to donor relations than to broad grassroots outreach. But I think in fairness, the court learned quickly that it needed to broaden its outreach and that because civil society organizations like the Documentation Center that I advise were already active in villages around the country conducting outreach forums, that the court paired with them in many instances so that in areas that don't have internet connectivity, television and radio access, court officials went to different areas of the country with NGOs who were already well known in those environments and shared lessons about what was happening in the court. Other NGOs have done outreach programs including sharing leaflets, the court has its own leaflet, high school classroom outreach events, welcoming large numbers of people on buses to come into the tribunal and yes, the government has broadcast some of the more important hearings on television, their regular radio shows and so over time what we see is that public awareness of this process which was the awareness that there was a trial of Khmer Rouge happening was high from the outset, the awareness of what the specifics were was negligible at the outset but climbed rapidly in around 2009 when the first tribunal, a trial reached its crescendo with the conviction of Doik and in the last few years it's fair to say that most Cambodians are aware that there's a trial going on in Phnom Penh that involves you and Cambodian judges that it's issued a few verdicts, they've probably seen television shows, heard radio broadcasts and been to a village forum talking about it. Their level of detailed knowledge is of course limited. They aren't able necessarily to follow it on a day to day basis, very few are but it's improved dramatically because there's been a general openness to sharing what's going on at the tribunal. Susan? Very much for the overview, it was great to hear it in a succinct way and I also really appreciated the, laying out the general principles and helping us to see into what some of the complexities are when you translate those principles and try to implement them and that kind of leads to the question about how sanguine you are about the future of these hybrid courts. We've had quite a number of them and if I'm not mistaken, it's only Lebanon that deals with the case that happened after the International Criminal Court came into effect but even if I've got that a little bit off, the question is if we were now to think about a country that had problems that could be crimes that were committed of this sort that could be addressed by the International Criminal Court like maybe Central African Republic, would you be more inclined to think that those should be referred to the ICC or would you be in favor of a hybrid court and if the answer isn't clear cut, what kind of considerations would you advise? It's a great question. I should start by saying that in the United Nations Secretariat in the Office of Legal Affairs, the idea of a hybrid court was described to me by people as radioactive and other similar adjectives because this and other experiences have been very difficult for the UN. The ICC of course exercises its jurisdiction on the basis of complementarity as you know well and steps in at least in theory only when the domestic courts are unable or unwilling to prosecute. One thing that we discuss a fair amount in the book that I didn't address is how complementarity can be implemented in practice and there's a sort of spectrum between a fully international process in the Hague at the ICC and a fully domestic process with very limited international engagement. Now of course the next step up from a domestic process would be one that's primarily domestic but has technical assistance provided from the ICC or from another international agency. And then further up, we have sort of predominantly domestic hybrid court, predominantly international. I think that it is probably both necessary and appropriate that hybrid courts remain on the menu of options. Certainly they are not a favored option by almost any of the international lawyers I spoke to. They're seen as something that may occasionally be requisite because it's not politically possible to have a case at the ICC because the host country or the country in which the crime was committed doesn't consent to ICC jurisdiction but also undesirable to leave the matter entirely in the hands of the domestic government. And so it's conceivable that we could see more of these negotiated in the future. It's also very much the case that some developing countries who are suspicious of course of the ICC have taken steps to create hybrid models of their own. In Senegal, the new extraordinary African chambers are modeled vaguely on the ICCC model except the UN isn't the international counterparty. It's another African international presence. I don't think it's formally African Union but I think that it's a coalition of neighboring African states who are represented. And this analysis can also give us a little bit of insight into how those may be managed effectively. And so the short answer to your question is difficult. I suppose I would say that I would prefer in all instances for the proceeding to be domestic if it can be done effectively. I would rather have international support of an effective domestic process than have a case removed to the ICC. And if I think that neither of those options is available then the UN or the ICC will have to negotiate in that middle space as almost occurred in Libya. You're right to pick up on that tension. The Cambodian government's interest in this is, well let me start by saying that many of the people who are in the Cambodian government, like most Cambodians at large, were victims of Khmer Rouge brutality. And so there are very strong individual level reasons why many elites in the Cambodian government are genuinely interested in seeing convictions of key Khmer Rouge leaders. That said, the Cambodian government's bigger concern throughout the process has been to manage it in a way that accrues to the political benefit of the government that's in power. And managing it in that way has meant at least Hun Sen, the prime minister and his key leaders sock on the deputy prime ministers, very involved in this, regard expansive prosecutions as dangerous. A limited universe they believe that's focused on a handful of the senior surviving, the most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders is one that allows the incumbent government to communicate to the public that we indeed are not just the government that brought the Khmer Rouge to heel through counterinsurgency means, but we're the government that has delivered you justice for their atrocities and it's part of their narrative of legitimacy. An expansive prosecution gets dicey from the perspective of the incumbents because an expansive prosecution may start to target people in senior government positions who are former Khmer Rouge members who were either late defectors from the Khmer Rouge into the movement that later became the current government or people who were given those positions as part of amnesty reconciliation type deals about 15, 20 years ago. And so the incumbent leadership believes, I think correctly, that there are at least some in the international side of the operation who would be happy to expand prosecutions in a way that would not only smear the, not only, sorry, not only target Khmer Rouge but also have the effect of delegitimating the incumbent regime. And so that I think has caused them to be particularly keen to control this and keep the prosecutions very narrow. I'm just wondering if you can give some examples of feasible but also sufficient reparations, maybe ones that aren't financial, if funding is so limited, that would still appease the victims and grant the court more legitimacy. Yeah, good question. When collective and moral reparations were mentioned as a possibility, the NGO I advise and many others suggested a range of things that might meet those criteria. A national day of remembrance, a modest memorial, the funding of which could come from voluntary contributions if the defendant was indigent and if the court didn't have the budget to do it. Voluntary, voluntarily programs with voluntary civil society participation that would be arranged with the blessing of the court but that wouldn't obligate resources from the court. These were all possibilities and I still don't know, I've asked a number of people, I still don't know why the court didn't put those remedies in place at the end of the first trial because I thought that they were lawfully well within its discretion and that they would have had the effect that you just mentioned of being much more meaningful to survivors. What is clear is that the court officials in question learned after the first trial that they had to look for these types of remedies, things that wouldn't commit judicial funds or require the defendants to be non-indigent but that would nevertheless be meaningful and that's how they came up with this idea of allowing NGOs to essentially apply for court stamp of approval for projects that would be implemented with other sources of funding. Yes, sir. Two quick questions. One is over the years when I've read about Cambodia, I mean whatever e-wrest paper or covered it, you know the range of deaths, you know at one point I read it was four million people and then somebody did an article that said all, it was less than 40,000. Is the 1.7 million, is that a pretty hard number or is it, how do you figure out how many people were affected? And the second thing is, is the process facilitating a more open society where this won't recur in the future? Both excellent questions. The question about the 1.7 million. So 1.7 million is an estimate generated by the Yale historian Ben Kiernan. Other historians and political scientists have estimated 1.5 million, two million. The documentation center that I advise has evidence to suggest the figure might be slightly higher than that, but you're right that there's a tremendous range. Nobody knows exactly how many people died during that period. And one of the reasons why is that so many people died immediately preceding that period and so many died in conflict immediately after that period and village level inquiries into times of death are often met with response as well. It was around 1979 or it was around 1975 that so-and-so passed away and your question gets to something really important here, which is that I said at the outset that this is a narrow process. It's only looking at a little part of Cambodia's tormented history. And the debate over numbers is reflective of the political contestation over what happened in Cambodia's past. Very resonant with comments that my colleague Yazir made yesterday about how stories are told about transitional justice processes. In the 1970s and thereafter, scholars that were highly critical of the US engagement of Indochina tended to derive lower figures of estimated deaths in the Pol Pot regime and to assign larger numbers of deaths to the Civil War period in the early 70s, which was the period in which the United States bombed Cambodia and supported a right wing government. Others have tended to emphasize a higher figure such as the incumbent Cambodian government in part to diminish a sense of loss of life in the early 1980s when that government was a protagonist in the Third Indochina War. So nobody knows exactly how hard the 1.7 million figure is. The second question is about, can you remind me just two words? Is the process of the going through, is it going to do something about open society yet? Because Cambodia is a breakthrough example of how many times or the central in the Congo. These things tend to go like this and never stop. Is this process going to help that process or? This process has, let me start with sort of its effects on the government or on the sort of political institutions and then the sort of non-state effects that I see. Political institutions, I don't think that this process has had a major catalytic effect. There's no major reform of the judiciary or of other elements of government. There continue to be human rights abuses, violations of the rights of workers, of displaced persons, political activists and so forth. That said, this process has enabled people to talk much more openly about the particular subject that it addresses, which is the Khmer Rouge period. Up until about seven or eight years ago, there was just one line in history textbooks in Cambodian text about the Khmer Rouge period. It said something like, and then the terrible three-year periods of Pol Pot occurred, period. Next chapter, many people didn't know is it was so painful to address in classrooms and so contentious politically that it simply was swept under the rug in official histories and in educational programs. The advent of this process was instrumental in opening up some of that space because the government was going on record and saying this is now a topic that can be openly discussed. We even broadcast it on national TV and that enabled people, including a colleague of mine who wrote a textbook that has now been introduced in every Cambodian secondary school and university and a nationwide program to educate people on that period. That's very important, not just for non-recurrent. It's also important for individual people's lives because you had so many people whose parents or aunts and uncles or grandparents were suffering from terrible after-effects of the tragedy who simply didn't either believe them or didn't understand what they had gone through. And so opening space to talk about this period hasn't transformed the rule along the country, but it has addressed an important subset of social needs. I was curious how much the domestic politics within Cambodia influenced all of this. You talked about the regime that was running things in there and obviously they played the greatest role in determining what the court could do, but they must have had opponents in the domestic politics. And honestly, I can't, are there both opponents who wanted more prosecutions broader as well as others that wanted less? Or how did that all fit together? There's a small portion of the country in the Northwest near the Thai border that is still home to many people who are former Khmer Rouge members. And interestingly, although that community has been suspicious of this process for fear that other community leaders would be indicted, there hasn't been a grassroots campaign against it. By and large, that community made it to peace with the incumbent government in the 1990s and thereafter and hasn't abstracted strenuously to the trials. The main opposition party is a liberal, comparatively liberal party that tends to have support from the U.S. and other Western governments. And it has likewise supported Khmer Rouge prosecutions but has found fault with the government for impeding progress toward additional prosecutions. Unfortunately, that political opposition has been operating in an environment as I characterized earlier that is still not very tolerant of dissent and so it's been difficult at times for opposition political figures to make this case successfully. But there is a domestic political dimension. So it's not just, you're right to point that out. It's not just internationals who are criticizing the prime minister for blocking additional prosecutions. It's also his principal domestic opponents. And those opponents scored surprisingly large gains in the last national election which happened last July. And since then there have been a series of demonstrations not focused mainly on this court but focused on other political grievances. Whether this court was a partial catalyst for that process of the opposition gaining votes and coming out into the streets, I doubt that it was a major factor. I think that current day social grievances were much more important but certainly one of the issues that the protesters and that the opposition have focused on is the perception that the government is heavy-handedly managing this process just like it manages data-dangers, judicial functions in the country. But so far the opposition hasn't become the government that they think that it's in the same regime all through this. Correct, correct. And so no major change, I know it's one. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us to hear about John Chorchari's new book. I invite you to stay. We have refreshments and continue the conversation. There's also the book signing. And so just as a final round if you'll join me in thanking John once again.