The former foreign minister of the now-defunct Khmer Rouge movement plans to appeal to Cambodia’s genocide tribunal against his pretrial detention, a court spokesman said yesterday.
The UN-assisted tribunal has charged Ieng Sary, 82, with crimes against humanity and war crimes. He is due to appear today to press for his release, tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath said.
Ieng Sary is one of five defendants being held by the tribunal, which plans to begin its first trial later this year. His wife, 76-year-old Ieng Thirith, who served as the Khmer Rouge’s social affairs minister, is also being held on charges of crimes against humanity.
The tribunal, jointly run by Cambodian and international personnel, attempts to establish accountability for the atrocities committed by the communist group when it ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.
The group’s radical policies resulted in the deaths of about 1.7 million people, who were executed or died of starvation, disease or hard labor.
In their detention order in November, the investigating judges said Ieng Sary is being prosecuted for supporting Khmer Rouge policies that were “characterized by murder, extermination, imprisonment, persecution on political grounds and other inhuman acts such as forcible transfers of the population, enslavement and forced labor.”
Ieng Sary has dismissed the charges against him as “unacceptable” and demanded evidence to support them, a copy of his detention order said.
He and his wife belonged to the inner circle of the Khmer Rouge and were in-laws to the movement’s late leader Pol Pot, who was married to Khieu Ponnary, Ieng Thirith’s sister. Ieng Thirith took her husband’s surname after they got married.
In 1996, Ieng Sary received a royal pardon from former King Norodom Sihanouk as a reward for leading his followers to join the government. The mutiny foreshadowed the Khmer Rouge collapse three years later in 1999.
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