On New Year’s Eve 2011 I flew to Cambodia to get CSEL’s 2012 work off to an international start, witnessing human rights law in action. We went to run training sessions at the UN / Cambodian hybrid court of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) www.eccc.gov.kh/en, where the second trial of Khmer Rouge leaders has just begun. The current defendants are amongst those being tried for some of the atrocities and ‘killing fields’ of the 1970s.
CSEL’s work at the intersection of psychology and law, and particularly around trauma, memory and the practice of justice, is highly relevant to the ECCC. In December 2011, a publication on the impact of “trauma psychology” by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) www.dccam.org – an international NGO documenting the history of the Khmer Rouge period – had cited our research and emphasised the value of training legal actors in psychological issues at the ECCC, to ensure that the best quality justice can be provided by the court.
With Pennie Blackburn, a Clinical Psychologist experienced in work with torture survivors, and cross-cultural psychology and training, I gave a one day training session to legal monitors from the War Crimes Studies Center of the University of California (Berkeley), who will write weekly reports of the trial proceedings (see www.krtmonitor.org). We also provided two days of training - hosted by the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) - for a number of the ECCC lawyers (including the two lead co-lawyers) and their assistants. The training covered an introduction to how psychology is relevant to legal decision making; psychological responses to trauma; research showing the impact of psychological issues on legal decision making; and how to look after oneself psychologically when working with traumatised people.
It will be interesting to see how psychological issues in the presentation of legal evidence are recognised and responded to in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in 2012.
Jane Herlihy.
