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In February of this year, it issued a press statement highlighting serious allegations of kickbacks that Cambodian court personnel, including judges, must give to Cambodian government officials in exchange for their positions on the tribunal. It expressed concern that these allegations were undermining the credibility of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and called for the report of a comprehensive investigation to be made public.
Already punitive measures have been taken against OSJI. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal administration office has cut off its cooperation with the organization and ended all contact with it. The OSJI staff has not even been allowed to enter the administration office of the tribunal. For their part, Cambodian judges demanded that OSJI retract its allegations and urged it to publicly affirm that none of them were implicated in the corruption allegations.
Punitive reactions to messengers of bad news have now become a hallmark of the Cambodian government. Last year it mounted a similar attack on several of them. In March, Prime Minister Hun Sen attacked Prof. Yash Ghai, special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for human rights in Cambodia, after the U.N. official presented a report that was critical of human rights in Cambodia. At a press conference at the end of his second mission to Cambodia in late March, Yash Ghai said that he did not see "any great improvement (from his first visit)." He was "struck by the enormous centralization of power, not only in the government, but in one individual."
"I have talked to judges, politicians and all sorts of people," he said, "and everyone is so scared. Everything depends on one individual, and that is not really a precondition under which human rights can flourish."
Hun Sen did not wait long to react to Yash Ghai's comments by making disparaging remarks referring to Yash Ghai's poor homeland of Kenya, and accusing him of knowing nothing about Cambodia. Hun Sen then urged U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to sack Yash Ghai. He also threatened to shut the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia, created under the Paris Peace Accords of 1991, and accused the staff of this office of being "long-term tourists."
Both Kofi Annan and Louise Arbour, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, urged Hun Sen to continue his cooperation with both Yash Ghai and the OHCHR-Cambodia office. Although Hun Sen has calmed down, he still has refused to receive Yash Ghai to talk about the human rights problems afflicting Cambodia.
Meanwhile, in May 2006, Hun Sen lashed out at critics of the judges appointed to serve on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, judges that were widely known to be affiliated with the ruling party, the Cambodian People's Party, of which Hun Sen is the vice chairman. He branded these critics as being "perverted sex-crazed animals."
Moreover, in early August last year he again lashed out, this time at the director of the Economic Institute of Cambodia, Sok Hach, calling him an "ignorant scholar" after the institute issued a report based on a survey of 1,200 businessmen that revealed corruption was prevalent in the collection of taxes. Because of this corruption, the report said, the government could only collect 25 percent of the taxes owed and lost about US$400 million in revenue in 2005.
All these attacks against critics reflect badly on the Cambodian government itself. They are a testimony to the government's failure to honor its obligations to respect human rights under the Paris Peace Agreements of 1991 that ended the war in Cambodia, the various international human rights instruments to which Cambodia is a party and the Constitution of the country. All of the critics above have just exercised their right to freedom of expression and have discharged their respective duties to ensure respect for and observance of human rights in Cambodia, the independence and impartiality of judges of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and integrity in the government's collection of taxes. The same attacks also greatly damage the Cambodian government's longstanding stance of combating corruption.
In short, the Cambodian government's incriminatory reactions to bad news turn to hypocrisy its long-proclaimed commitment to the respect for and observance of human rights and its purported fight against corruption. A government with a genuine commitment would instead investigate such allegations of human rights violations and corruption once they are known. Such reactions simply sweep the allegations away and suppress the country's problems.
Furthermore, as far as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal is concerned, and considering that the OSJI also has the status of an international monitoring NGO, the expulsion of OSJI and the revocation of its foreign staff's visas break the notion and spirit of Article 12(2) of the agreement between the United Nations and the Cambodian government which stipulates that "representatives . . . of national and international non-governmental organizations will at all time have access to the proceedings before the (Khmer Rouge Tribunal)." This punishment of an international NGO, which has merely sought to ensure that the Cambodian people attain justice for their past suffering, will engender public mistrust in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and undercut the credibility which this tribunal, like any other court of law, must have.
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(Lao Mong Hay is currently a senior researcher at the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong. He was previously director of the Khmer Institute of Democracy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and received the Nansen Medal in 2000 from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.)
