Lawyer from BiH Defends "Red Khmer" Before Court in Cambodia!

A lawyer from Bosnia and Herzegovina from East Sarajevo, Suzana Tomanović, is defending one of the suspected war criminals from the period of the "Red Khmer" rule in that country before the special tribunal for war crimes in Cambodia, the BiH news agency Patria (NAP) has learned.

Tomanović confirmed this information in a statement to the NAP agency, and emphasized that she is not the only lawyer from BiH working in Cambodia at the special tribunal established to shed light on the crimes of the "Red Khmer" from the period between 1975 and 1979.

- The community of lawyers dealing with international criminal law in the world is not large. Some people who worked at the Hague Tribunal have now moved to Cambodia. I have some experience at the Tribunal and am now engaged as a foreign lawyer in case 004. It is strictly forbidden for me to say anything about the specific case – Tomanović said in a statement to NAP.

According to her, Cambodia established a special court with the help of the international community, and in addition to domestic forces, foreigners are engaged, including lawyers, members of judicial panels, and prosecutors.

- There are several people from BiH, one is a deputy prosecutor, there are lawyers from Croatia. I regularly go to Cambodia and had to become a member of the bar association of that country to work on these cases and take an oath before their Supreme Court – Tomanović points out.

So far, as she says, one person has been sentenced to life imprisonment before the special court in Cambodia, and another trial has been opened in which two suspects have died. The "Red Khmer" were an extremely hardline communist party that ruled Cambodia for four years from '75 to '79 under the leadership of the infamous Pol Pot. During their rule, they committed horrific crimes against the population of Cambodia in an attempt to achieve a delusional agrarian reform and an ethnically pure Khmer state, killing about one and a half million people. The most famous crimes occurred in the killing fields.