Justice and The Khmer Rouge: Concepts of Just Response to the Crimes of the Democratic Kampuchean regime in Buddhism and The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia at the time of the Khmer Rouge tribunal.

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to analyze two approaches to concepts of a just response to the atrocities of Democratic Kampuchea as they are presently operating in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and in Khmer Buddhism. It assessed what Buddhism and the ECCC offer in answer to Cambodians’ justice needs and where both ways of conceiving justice overlap and diverge. The research was a qualitative study from a constructivist perspective using semi-structured in-depth interviews with the monastic community, an official at the ECCC and a group of therapists at an NGO working with survivors. It concluded that in order to answer the justice deficit left by the Khmer Rouge era a polyphonic response working at a micro and macro level, involving both an official process and others rooted in local cultural dynamics is required in order to provide survivors with ways to express their suffering, receive acknowledgement of it, and have their persecutors held to account. Both Buddhism and the ECCC offer ideas on retributive and restorative modes of justice that are complementary to each other and provided a way to calm minds that are still deeply wounded 30 years after the end of the regime.