What sentence would be appropriate for a person convicted of overseeing the torture and killing of up to 16,000 people? Only the death penalty or, if you oppose the death penalty in even the worst cases, life in prison could even begin to satisfy the demands of justice and basic decency for such crimes against humanity.
But justice is not necessarily the goal when unaccountable international judicial bodies are given the power to try vicious killers. And now, a U.N.-backed tribunal has given only a 19-year sentence to a man who admitted he had aided in the slaughter of as many as 16,000 innocent people in Cambodia, in Southeast Asia, in the late 1970s.
Kaing Guek Eav, known as “Duch,” was the top jailer for the dreaded Communist Khmer Rouge regime, which killed close to 2 million Cambodians. The country became known for its unspeakable “killing fields.”
The court freely acknowledged that Duch eagerly oversaw and sometimes participated in the torture and murder of his countrymen. “(H)e showed a high degree of efficiency and zeal,” the judges wrote. Yet the U.N.-backed judges said he had shown some “limited” remorse for his crimes and had been cooperative, so they gave him only 19 years. He may one day leave prison a free man.
“It comes down to serving 111/2 hours per life that he took,” a woman whose parents were murdered by the Khmer Rouge told The Associated Press.
Disgustingly, even as surviving relatives of Duch’s victims wept bitter tears over the lenient sentence, a U.S. State Department spokesman bizarrely praised it: “We applaud the commitment of the national and international judges for their comprehensive and independent work to uphold international standards of justice and due process in this case,” said spokesman P.J. Crowley.
Rather than “applaud” such a sentence, the United States should forcefully condemn it. And this case is even more proof of why we should certainly not grant international courts jurisdiction over U.S. citizens.