In addition to the negotiations between the Cambodian government and the U.N. over the composition of the court, Cambodia’s capacity to hold fair trials in its courts has been scrutinized in other ways as well. Various important trials that have taken place in Cambodian courts over the past several years have been seen as diagnostic. Khmer Rouge commander Nuon Paet was legitimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the kidnapping deaths of three foreign tourists in 1994. (However, higher-level Khmer Rouge commanders implicated in the same murders were never put on trial, and currently serve in the military.) In 1998, human rights workers who had been arrested for protesting toxic waste dumping in Sihanoukville, were subsequently released due to lack of evidence. These trials were scrutinized by international observers for signs of corruption, lack of due process, and political influence, leading many to conclude that the presence of international observers is essential to ensuring credible trials of Khmer Rouge leaders.

Another approach to boosting the capacity of the Cambodian courts was that taken by the Cambodian Genocide Program, based at Yale University and funded in part by the U.S. State Department [www.yale.edu/cgp]. In 1995 and 1996, the Program conducted legal training courses in Cambodia to improve the ability of Cambodians to pursue and promote legal remedies for the crimes against humanity they suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The participants were about twenty people from Cambodian human rights organizations, the Cambodian Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Foreign Ministry, the Council of Ministers, and independent legal advocacy groups. The course included an introduction to the major sources of international law, a grounding in human rights law, individual responsibility under international law, and general principles of criminal procedure and evidence. The course also covered the two ad-hoc criminal tribunals for the genocidal crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, for the purpose of comparison.

Political dimensions of the process
It was only four years ago that a trial of Khmer Rouge leaders began to seem possible. In April 1997, nearly twenty years after the genocide, the United Nations adopted resolution 1997/49, which requested the Secretary General, through his Special Representative, to examine any request for assistance in responding to past serious violations of Cambodian and international law. The Cambodian government followed with a letter dated June 21, 1997, signed by the then co-Prime Ministers, Prince Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen, requesting the assistance of the United Nations and the international community in "bringing to justice those persons responsible for the genocide and crimes against humanity during the rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979."