CJA In The News

The Center for Justice and Accountability is helping Cambodian-Americans seeking a place at Khmer Rouge tribunal hearings. Under tribunal rules the victims have a right to file grievances and applications to be witnesses, even if they have fled overseas.

On a recent Saturday in Long Beach, survivors of the Khmer Rouge stepped to a microphone to tell stories that are hard to hear.

Distance is perhaps one barrier that prevents US-Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge from participating in UN-backed trials underway in Phnom Penh. But that did not stop Chanthorn Pech or Roath Prom from becoming participants in the tribunal’s next case—002—an atrocity trial for four jailed Khmer Rouge leaders.

One of the worst genocides of the 20th century happened in Cambodia, in the 1970s. The extremist Khmer Rouge party, led by Pol Pot tried to create a rural farming society, evacuating people from their homes and jobs in urban areas to the country, where many were killed by the government, starved, or were worked to death.

A year-and-a-half ago when refugee survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime gathered in Long Beach to fill out forms about atrocities they witnessed in the mid-’70 s in Cambodia, they had no idea whether it would make a difference. On Saturday, many of them got their answer.

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The Obama administration has announced that key suspects in the 9/11 attacks will be tried by military commissions at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay—not in U.S. civilian court. There will, however, be one Guantánamo case tried in New York. Today the New York State Supreme Court will hear the case against Dr. John Leso, a psychologist accused of participating in torture during interrogation of detainees in Guantánamo. The case was brought on behalf of Dr. Steven Reisner, who is at the center of a growing group of medical professionals campaigning against the participation of psychologists in the U.S. government’s interrogation programs.

On the same day President Barack Obama formally launched his re-election campaign, his attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that key suspects in the 9/11 attacks would be tried not in federal court, but through controversial military commissions at Guantánamo. Holder blamed members of Congress, who, he said, “have intervened and imposed restrictions blocking the administration from bringing any Guantánamo detainees to trial in the United States.” Nevertheless, one Guantánamo case will be tried in New York.

MANHATTAN (CN) – New York State Supreme Court Justice Saliann Scarpulla said that she sympathized with, but is unlikely to grant, a licensed psychologist’s petition to compel an investigation into another psychologist’s alleged human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay.