Book review: Victims, Atrocity and International Criminal Justice: Lessons from Cambodia
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758019844841 |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
insight into victims’ perspectives. Whilst at first the volume can come across as rather broad and
philosophical (especially in its opening three chapters, which the author devotes to reviewing
conceptions of justice), the author’s very thesis is that such deliberations about the meaning of
justice in fact occur not just in books but are actively pursued by citizen-victims in everyday life. In
short form, the very practical implications of the argument are, therefore, that simplistic measures
of victim ‘satisfaction’ with the criminal justice system do very little to reflect th is complex
process of integration between public and private interests that go into such victims’ conceptions
of the ‘justice’ they have experienced. In exposing such issues, Holder effectively challenges the
fundamentally undemocratic nature of most justice processes as well as research designs. As such,
the reader is left to consider whether it is perhaps this fundamental distinction between the
democratic means by which citizens arrive at notions of justice and the undemocratic means by
which both the system and ‘experts’ who study it approach the notion which leaves researchers still
begging questions.
Rachel Killean
Victims,Atrocity and International Criminal Justice: Lessons from Cambodia
Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018; 246 pp.; ISBN 978-1-138-73776 -1 (hbk).
Reviewed by: Peter Manning, University of Bath, UK
DOI: 10.1177/0269758019844841
On 16 November 2018, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) deliv-
ered verdicts of genocide and crimes against humanity for two former Khmer Rouge leaders, a
moment widely thought to mark the culmination of the work of the court. The ECCC has
occupied a novel place within the wider landscape of international criminal justice, operating
as a United Nations- (UN-)backed ‘internationalised’ institution within Cambodia’s domestic
court system, working between domestic Cambodian law and international criminal law (ICL),
and appointing both domestic and international judicial staff across its organs. Over 12 years of
work, and despite a principally retributive focus and mandate, the ECCC has also come to
integrate and offer unique avenues for victim participation and the potential to award forms
of reparation to victims’ groups. In Victims, Atrocity and International Criminal Justice: Lessons
from Cambodia, Killean offers a lucid, careful and textured analysis of the contested place and
experiences of victim participation at the ECCC, documenting the challenges, successes and
indeed failures of the ECCC process.
The first three chapters of the book contextualise the ECCC within the wider landscape of
scholarship and practice in ICL, situating the nascent centrality of victims within past failures to
accommodate them in ICL interventions, the emergence and development of victim tropes in
transitional justice and the precedent of enhanced victim participation at the International Criminal
Court. In doing so, Killean demonstrates the need to appreciate the reflexive relationship between
scholarship and practice in these fields. Killean proceeds to locate the ECCC within wider inter-
national and domestic political histories, noting the interests and conflicts between the UN and the
Royal Government of Cambodia that produced but also circumscribed the mandate of the ECCC,
272 International Review of Victimology 25(2)
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