ABC Radio Australia
The United Nations' chief legal counsel called for donors to help fund Cambodia's United Nations backed genocide trial. The tribunal is not funded by UN member states but instead relies on voluntary contributions. Since 2006 it has cost around 50 million US dollars a year to run. Now a former high-profile supporter of the UN-backed tribunal says further funding would be a waste of money.Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch Asia division director
Listen: Windows MediaSEN: Brad you were a vocal supporter of the UN backed tribunal before but not now so what changed your mind?
ADAMS: We had very high hopes for this tribunal. For more than 20 years politics had stopped the international community from helping Cambodians bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. There were Cold War politics between the United States, China, the former Soviet Union and Vietnam that stopped it. We thought that the tribunal would be able to bring new facts to the Cambodian people, let them know what really happened. We thought that it would be a chance to create a model court in Cambodia where there would be an independent judiciary and where some of the judges and prosecutors involved would be able to take the skills that they obtained from this process and bring them into the Cambodian courts and try to improve Cambodia's terrible judicial system, which is essentially under the thumb of Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Cambodian government and does its bidding.
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