On February 18, Cambodia’s Ministry of Justice released a statement regarding an opinion article I had published in Radio Free Asia (RFA) a few days earlier, headlined, “Banning Khmer Rouge denialism is a bad move for Cambodia and the world.” I won’t recite what I wrote, although I would note that my article was more of an inquiry into how much we can learn about the minds of people who commit atrocities when most published testimonies are from victims, not perpetrators. The concern I expressed was that Cambodia’s updated law on Khmer Rouge denialism could make it more difficult to collect testimony from the aging generation of perpetrators.

The Justice Ministry’s statement came the same day the National Assembly passed the “Law Against Non-Recognition of the Crimes Committed During the Democratic Kampuchea Period,” which (nearly identical to an existing law) criminalizes any effort to “deny, trivialize, reject or dispute the authenticity of crimes” committed by the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979. The Ministry’s critique of my article attracted a bit of publicity. Per the Khmer Times, “British journalist Hutt slammed over genocide law criticism.” (It was nice to see my Britishness referenced on this occasion since the same gutter rag once dubbed me “a man without a nation, a nomad writer without a family.”)

Here is a reply to the Justice Ministry, and I do hope they can answer my questions (re-listed at the end for ease). The Ministry’s statement was published in Khmer, so I apologize if I make some minor translation errors. It seems to me that it makes three main points.

Point One: this isn’t an issue of free speech. “Non-recognition or promotion of these crimes… is not an exercise in freedom of expression… It is a serious insult to the souls of those who lost their lives during that period, as well as a cause of renewed pain for the families of the victims who are still alive today,” it stated. The second claim isn’t necessarily connected to the first, yet if free expression means anything, it means the right to offend. But let’s not get dragged down by philosophical musings on free speech.

You can say the law is justified and legal under international law (I haven’t disputed that). The Justice Ministry could have, for instance, pointed out that the European Court of Human Rights ruled that European states’ Holocaust denial laws are legal under European conventions. However, one could also point out that the U.N. Human Rights Committee........

© The Diplomat