GLOBAL CHALLENGES

IT Company on the Forefront of Global Justice Delivered

Dennis McCafferty | Date: 12-07-10 | Comments

The Khmer Rouge has been linked to potentially millions of deaths in Cambodia in the 1970s. Thanks to an innovative e-discovery solution from a Virginia company, prosecutors are finally able to pursue convictions of suspects.

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IT Company on the Forefront of Global Justice Delivered

From 1975 to 1979, Khmer Rouge leaders are alleged to have played a role in the deaths of 740,000 to 3 million people, depending upon which study is being cited. But until this year, authorities in Cambodia have failed to secure a single conviction.

On July 26, 2010, however, all of this changed. That's when Kaing Guek Eav (a.k.a. "Duch")�who ran the notorious Tuol Sleng prison camp in Phnom Penh�was found guilty of murder, torture and crimes against humanity. A McLean, Va.-based e-discovery and information management solutions company has played a primary role in the prosecution of Kaing Guek Eav, as well as other surviving suspects in these crimes.

The company, ZyLAB, has much experience in this area. Earlier this decade, it provided e-discovery tools and services to enable an International Criminal Tribunal to pursue crimes against humanity charges against Slobodan Milosovich, the former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia. There were 200,000 people killed under Milosovich's watch, including 12,000 children, according to an estimate from the International Committee of the Red Cross. (Milosovich died in his cell on March 11, 2006, before a conviction could be delivered.)

ZyLAB has gone on to provide these tech solutions and services for other tribunal trials in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Lebanon. For the Khmer Rouge cases, ZyLAB provided its services to the United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials/Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (UNAKRT/ECCC), using a system modeled after the one deployed for the Milosovich case.

The Cambodian trials have presented their own unique challenges.

In legal terms, for example, the ECCC's procedures differ from those of other tribunals. Investigations before the trial stage are carried out not only by prosecutors and defense attorneys, but by two co-investigating judges: a "national judge" designated to represent Cambodia, and the other representing international interests. These two judges are responsible for collecting evidence to determine if the facts presented by the prosecution constitute a crime before the Cambodian court, as well as if the charged person is to be indicted and sent to trial. Also in Cambodia�unlike common-law systems where the evidence is presented directly to the judge by the prosecution and defense�all documents collected and placed in the case file by the investigative judges constitute the basis for the proceedings before the trial chamber.

Then there is the sheer volume of that evidence. It was preserved in videos, audio tapes, e-mail summaries and other formats, much of it documenting the testimony of refugees who fled from Cambodia in the 1970s. Most of these testimonies were conducted in the languages of Russian, French, English and Khmer. ZyLAB implemented an e-discovery system based on the ZyLAB Information Management Platform, in which all of these testimonies could be readily searched and found, regardless of what language they were in.

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