News

Victim demands heard

Lawers for civil parties outlined reparations requests yesterday at the Khmer Rouge tribunal, demanding compensation for the suffering of their clients as the court’s historic second case stretched into its third day.Civil party participation has long been touted as a distinctive feature of the tribunal, the first international war crimes court to allow for direct victim participation. Some 3,850 civil parties are participating in Case 002, including 1,728 whose applications were originally rejected but who were accepted on appeal in a decision released last week.

Photo by: ECCC/POOL
                Former Khmer Rouge head of state
Khieu Samphan listens to court proceedings 
on a set of headphones at the Khmer Rouge
tribunal in Phnom Penh yesterday.

Speaking towards the end of the hearing yesterday, civil party lead co-lawyer Pich Ang offered a list of proposed reparations that he said would hopefully help victims “heal their psychological wounds”.“Those who applied to be civil parties have the intention to seek the truth and justice, and to seek reparations awards for the victims as well as for the society as a whole,” Pich Ang said.

Among the requests he listed were the construction of stupas and a memorial site, the establishment of a national day of remembrance of some kind, the preservation of crime sites for historical purposes and the establishment of a museum and archive related to Khmer Rouge history.

Pich Ang also called for the expanded teaching of Khmer Rouge history in Cambodian schools, the establishment of centres where victims can seek psychological treatment, the provision of citizenship to Vietnamese victims of the regime and an education programme for children born as a result of forced marriages during the KR period. A trust fund, he said, could be established to fund the proposed awards.

Trial Chamber president Nil Nonn noted that financial awards were not feasible given the large number of civil parties, and in any case, the court’s rules empower it to grant only “collective and moral” reparations.

Pich Ang’s foreign counterpart, civil party lead co-lawyer Elisabeth Simonneau Fort, said the reparations proposals named yesterday represented only preliminary suggestions, and that further consultation with victims and other lawyers was necessary.

“We have the possibility of modifying our request and adding, and it’s obvious that we will be obliged to do so,” Simonneau Fort said, noting the large number of civil parties that were admitted only last week.

Reparations were one of the more contentious aspects of the tribunal’s first verdict, which came last year in the case of former S-21 prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch.

In the Duch judgment, the court’s Trial Chamber granted a pair of reparations requests from civil parties: It printed the names of accepted civil parties in the verdict and pledged to collect and publish all statements of apology made by Duch during the proceedings.

Civil party lawyers and court monitors criticised these reparations as unimaginative and insufficient, though the judges said in their decision that they did not have the power to fund projects or make recommendations to the government.

At a plenary session in September, the court thus amended its rules to allow for more expansive reparations options that will be available to judges in Case 002. The court can now make non-binding recommendations to the government regarding reparations and design projects that can be implemented with external funding.

Sou Koeun, a Case 002 civil party from Kampong Speu province, said outside the court yesterday that he approved of the proposed awards.

“The most important for me is the memorial stupa for civil parties,” he said. “These reparations can help the victims recover from what happened a long time ago and the mental problems they have had since a long time ago.” Also yesterday, the court heard arguments on whether the statute of limitations for crimes in the 1956 Cambodian Penal Code had expired by the start of investigations in the case. While such crimes originally carried a 10-year statute of limitations, the 2001 law on the establishment of the tribunal extended this statute by an additional 20 years for crimes falling within the court’s jurisdiction. The 2004 amended tribunal law carried an additional 10-year extension.Cambodian deputy prosecutor Seng Bunkheang said the original 10-year statute of limitations did not apply due to the weakness of the Cambodian court system in the years following the Khmer Rouge reign. “Time was needed to ensure that a proper and functional judicial system could be reestablished,” he said. 

Photo by: Meng Kimlong
Chea Chanty, 44, from Battambang province,
attends the Khmer Rouge tribunal on Monday.
Chea Chanty says that he hopes to find ‘a little
bit of justice’ for eight of his relatives who were
killed by the Khmer Rouge.

But Michael Karnavas, a defence lawyer for former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary, said the extension of the statute of limitations represented an unjustified, retroactive alteration of the law. Trials were indeed conducted during the 1980s, however imperfectly, he added. “Was it a perfect situation? No. But if you pick up the newspapers and you read the reports on Cambodia today, you hear the same refrain – political interference, lack of independence and so on,” he said. Sa Sovan, a lawyer for former KR head of state Khieu Samphan, echoed the Ieng Sary team in arguing against the retroactive altering of the statute, though he acknowledged finding portions of the discussion inscrutable.
“Sometimes the words used here are so technical and sometimes it is hard for me to follow and to understand,” he said. In the Duch judgment, the judges were divided on whether the statute of limitations for crimes outlawed in the 1956 Penal Code had expired, and thus ruled only on the basis of international law.Ieng Sary left the hearing yesterday morning due to back pain, while KR Brother Number 2 Nuon Chea walked out for the third day in a row as his own case was not being considered. The other defendants, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary’s wife, former KR social action minister Ieng Thirith, stayed for the duration.After running behind schedule earlier this week, the tribunal is set to conclude this round of initial hearings today with a discussion of proposed witnesses. Hearings involving evidence and witness testimony are not expected until August or September.

Thursday, 30 June 2011 15:03 James O’Tool. 
DDR3 modules to remain leading DRAM technology in 2011, says IHS iSuppli 
Press release; Jessie Shen, DIGITIMES [Tuesday 28 June 2011]
the dominant technology in the DRAM market for 2011 and at least three more years before it cedes ground to a faster, next-generation version, according to IHS iSuppli.
DDR3 in 2011 is projected to account for 89% of the 808 million DRAM module units shipped this year, up from 67% in 2010 and 24% in 2009, according to IHS. In comparison, the older and slower DDR2 will make up 9% of the module market in 2011, down from 29% last year. The legacy-type product of DDR will take up the remaining module shipments in the market, said IHS.
DDR3 will see its share of DRAM module shipments actually rise during the next two years - to 92% in 2012 and to 94% the year after - before it heads down an irreversible cycle of decline that starts in 2014, IHS indicated. DDR4, whose standards are in the process of being finalized, is expected to make its first substantial presence in the market in 2014 immediately garnering about 12% share, IHS noted. By 2015, the tables will have turned with DDR4 modules taking a majority share of market at 56%, compared to 42% for DDR3, out of total DRAM module shipments of approximately 1.1 billion units, IHS said.
"DDR3 has been the main DRAM module technology shipped in terms of bits since the first quarter of 2010, gaining adoption quickly in the PC ecosphere as the market's primary driver," said Clifford Leimbach, analyst for memory demand forecasting at IHS. "Not only is DDR3 the dominant technology today in the three PC channels for original equipment manufacturers, the PC white-box space and the upgrade market, DDR3 is also the chief presence across all PC applications, such as desktops and laptops, as well as their subcategories in the performance, mainstream and entry-level computing sectors."
While erstwhile leader DDR2 remained at the pinnacle of the DRAM module market for approximately four years, DDR3 will enjoy a run at the top for a total of five, starting from 2010 until its projected end as the dominant force by 2014. By then, the main densities of DRAM modules also will have shifted from 1-gigabyte (1GB) in 2009 to 8GB in 2015, according to IHS.
With DRAM technology stabilizing for the time being, a new module form factor appears ready to make an initial foray into the higher-performance world of server computers, IHS observed. Load-reduced DIMM (LRDIMM), mainly in the form of higher densities at 16GB and up, are set to vastly increase the memory capabilities of high-capacity computing workhorses such as enterprise servers and mainframe computers. Not compatible with older systems, LRDIMMs will only begin shipping as new computer systems are procured, appearing in the second quarter, IHS said.

Source: IHS iSuppli, compiled by Digitimes, June 2011