ECCC Is Said to Extinguish Its Mandate by the End of 2010

There has been a flurry of discussion and reporting around the tribunal funding lately with divergent opinions and conflicting reports coming from different media outlets.

The human rights community seems to have split in half with the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) on one side and the coalition of Cambodian human rights NGOs, known as CHRAC, on the other. HRW's Sara Colm argued that reform must precede any additional funding pledged, whereas CHRAC argued that due to the dire straits in which the tribunal has found itself, funding must be committed prior to any discussion of future reforms.

Most recent reporting, however, suggests that the potential donors did not balk at the staggering additional $114 million budget proposal, submitted by the tribunal earlier this year, due to the lack of reform of its structure and procedures, but due to the size of that amount. The donors were reported to have received the revised budget favorably, now that it was $30 million lighter. It appears that the donor community is not as much concerned about the reform of the tribunal as it is about bringing this long-suffering and stumbling process to some type of a reasonable closure. If the ECCC is able to deliver by the new deadline this time around, the court will be out of business by the end of 2010, which leaves little room for reform efforts. It is not clear, however, what in the previous behavior of the tribunal has led the donor community to believe that the tribunal will make good on its promise this time around. If the tribunal's last 2 1/2 years of operation is of any guidance at all, it will take at least another 5 years to conclude the process from where we are now, provided the tribunal continues at the same pace as it started. This was corroborated by the former chief of budget and finance who was quoted as saying that "it is inappropriate to look at the judicial process and compare it with a budget plan [...] dollar amounts can change with judicial developments". This translates into a warning to the donor community that once they re-open their checkbooks, they had better keep them that way until the tribunal decides to extinguish itself of its own will, rather than trying to hold the tribunal to its current promise of a timeline, as there is no agreement between the donors and the tribunal about exactly how many suspects will be tried.