Recognition of Gendered Experiences of Harm at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia: The Promise and the Pitfalls

Abstract

Forty years after the beginning of the Khmer Rouge regime, the recent Trial Chamber judgment in case 002/01 before Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has provided legal recognition of the devastating violence of the forced population movements. However, despite the undoubted significance of the judgment, it represents a missed opportunity to more fully reflect issues of gender. The article argues that in order to capture the plurality of gendered experiences it is necessary to foreground a social understanding of harm. Drawing on civil party oral testimony, the article begins to surface gendered experiences of the social harms of familial separation and starvation of family members, harms that have often remained silenced in international criminal law. In doing so it seeks to contribute to emerging feminist discourse on broader gendered harms and illustrates the need for further scrutiny of the approach of the ECCC.