This paper focuses on victims’ participation at the ECCC. In a context in which victims’ rights are increasingly presented as the key rationale for transitional justice, the ECCC have been lauded for providing unprecedented victims’ rights. However these have been increasingly interpreted in a restrictive manner by the ECCC judges.
This suggests conflicting understandings of the role of victims in (retributive) justice. The introduction of unprecedented victims’ rights has thus to be explained beyond the mere existence of a French-inherited civil law system in Cambodia, which is the usual reasoning found in expert and academic literature. The hypothesis explored here is that transitional justice advocates have played a key role in introducing victims’ participation at the ECCC, which was later contested by the ECCC judges. This paper will thus explore the role of local and international actors in the adoption of victims’ participation at the ECCC, the international context of their advocacy and the local interpretation of internationally induced norms. Such focus disrupts assumptions on a clear-cut divide between the international and the local through the analysis of transnational networks and the understandings of peace and justice that inform them. This paper will further analyse victims’ participation as a space in which ‘ordinary’ Cambodians are confronted with formal transitional justice mechanisms. It will explore the resistance of ECCC judges to give space within the legal proceedings to victims that do not fit the prevalent representation of a “good victim” (a victim able to generalise his/her suffering and to be reasonable in both his/her claims and use of emotion).
This paper thereby speaks to the literature on critical approaches to transitional justice that adopts an actor-centred lens and highlights transitional justice as a political process of negotiation.
