Liberal Legal Norms Meet Collective Criminality

In early 2008, a Cambodian survivor confronted a Khmer Rouge leader for the first time at a U.N.-backed tribunal in Phnom Penh. Facing Pol Pot's infamous deputy, Nuon Chea, she recounted her parents' untimely deaths and her brutal imprisonment at age seven, when she was shackled beside her four-year-old brother. Nuon Chea has denied responsibility for these and other atrocities during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in the late 1970s, but the victim asked plaintively, "If Nuon Chea claimed he was not responsible, who was then for the loss of my parents and other victims' loved ones?"