Tuesday, February 24, 2009

No Appeal For Translation

From the ABC:

Lawyers for former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan have lost an appeal at the United Nations-backed genocide tribunal underway in Cambodia to have his case-file translated into French.

Khieu Samphan and his legal team had argued that French was one of the court's three official languages, and that if the associated documents were not available in that language, he would not receive a fair trial.

The appeal was lodged with the tribunal late last year, with Khieu Samphan's French lawyer, Jacques Verges, arguing that less than 3 percent of the 60,000-page case file had been translated into French.

However Judge Prak Kimsan, the head of the tribunal's pre-trial chamber, ruled the appeal was inadmissible because the court's rules do not provide for appeals relating to translation issues.

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