Khmer Rouge torturer Kaing Guek Eav, alias “Duch,” one of the most notorious killers under Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, was convicted on Monday of crimes against humanity including extermination, murder, enslavement, and a litany of other “grave breaches of the Geneva Convention.”
He was given a single sentence of 35 years’ imprisonment by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and will serve 19 years of that. The sentence was reduced to account for time already served during eight years of “illegal detention” by the military court, from 1999 through 2007.
While the ECCC described his crimes perpetrated against at least 12,273 victims “shocking and heinous,” the Chamber said the decision on the severity of the sentence took into account the “entirety of the circumstances of the case.”
These circumstances included Duch’s cooperation with the Chamber, his admission of responsibility, and the coercive environment under the communist regime at the time, in addition to his “potential for rehabilitation” and his “limited expression of remorse.”
Duch was convicted on international offenses but not under the Cambodian penal code since the “Chamber was divided on the question of whether responsibility for these crimes had been extinguished before the ECCC investigation of the accused commenced.” In the absence of a majority opinion, the Chamber made no decision regarding violations of domestic law.
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