Phnom Penh: Pol Pot’s last surviving henchman has launched his appeal against his life sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity. Khieu Samphan’s four-day hearing began on Monday. He first stated his intention to appeal in 2018 after being found guilty of genocide against the Cham Muslim minority and the Vietnamese people. His defence team told the court on Monday that that conviction had been made on insufficient grounds.
The legal team of the former Khmer Rouge’s head of state Khieu Samphan alleges there were not sufficient reasons for convicting Samphan or sentencing him to life in November 2018. Samphan’s lawyer, Kong Sam Onn, says that three days after Samphan was sentenced, they immediately filed an appeal which has taken almost three years to start.
Onn says, “I would like to remind you your honor that you did not decide on the merit of that judgment. Instead, you claim that our appeal cannot be accepted because it does not fall within the categories that stipulated in the internal rules. It is true that internal rules do not allow the trial chamber to issue a judgment into stages; rather the internal rule clearly prohibits and clearly stated special rules for the announcement of the judgment would require the reasons and it has to be written on the day of the announcement and base on the rule 101 of the format of the judgment that should be put into parts.”
The Trial Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted Samphan of genocide, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The court found him responsible, through his acts or omissions, as part of a criminal enterprise, for having planned, instigated, ordered, or aided and abetted, or being responsible by virtue of superior responsibility, for several crimes between 17 April 1975 and 6 January 1979.
The crimes included murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, persecution on political and racial grounds, and of genocide by killing Vietnamese nationals and members of the Cham community. The spokesman of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Neth Pheaktra, told EAC News that the appeal is set down for four days.
Pheaktra says, “The hearing of the Supreme Court Chamber to listing the agreement from the different party – from prosecutor, from colleague lawyers, from the defendant himself why they appeal against the judgment, especially from the defendant. So, the defendant already presents their argument this morning about the rule from the trial chamber on the judgment, the argument on the law and the other parties. After four day of the hearing, Khieu Samphan need to wait and other parties need to wait until the fourth semester in 2022 to get the final judgment pronounced by the Supreme Court Chamber.” He has added that apart from the four-day scheduled hearing, the Chamber has allocated Friday 20 August, as a reserve hearing day, if required.
