Word: humanity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the Khmer Rouge emptied the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh of human inhabitants in 1975, one of Pol Pot's soldiers murdered 4-year-old Theary Seng's father. Later, Theary Seng, her mother and siblings ended up in a prison in southeast Cambodia. One day, Theary Seng awoke to an empty cell - the prison population had been massacred overnight. In a rare act of mercy, the Khmer Rouge soldiers allowed the handful of children to survive. Theary Seng eventually escaped to a Thai refugee camp and then to the U.S. Her story is by no means unique in Cambodia...
Still traumatized by those years and subsequent decades of political instability, many Cambodians had hoped that the U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal, a hybrid Cambodian-international court, would help push the country toward reconciliation. In November 2007, Theary Seng, now a human-rights lawyer in Phnom Penh, applied to become the first civil party at the Khmer Rouge tribunal - whereby she and other Khmer Rouge victims are participating in the criminal proceedings with their own set of lawyers. On Friday, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) - the official name of the tribunal - finished hearing its first case...
...about their country's terrible past. Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, says that the fact that the tribunal was held in Cambodia was key to sparking interest in the trial and knowledge about the period. In January, the University of California at Berkeley's Human Rights Center released a report saying that 85% of Cambodians had little or no knowledge of the trial. Now, with the distribution of a new textbook on the Khmer Rouge coinciding with the trial, Youk Chhang says "the whole country is aware...
When Iranian Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work as a lawyer and human-rights activist, the regime in Tehran faced a dilemma. The award infuriated the country's hard-liners, but the regime privately acknowledged that it had also earned Ebadi the admiration of most Iranians. Reluctant to arrest or openly target such a popular figure, the government tolerated Ebadi's activities and limited itself to low-level harassment of her legal office...
...Iran's human-rights violations have not gone unreported. In the past few years, the rise of muckraking independent news outlets and news websites has emerged to spread the word on official abuses. Iran has changed dramatically since the mid-1990s, when Ebadi functioned as almost the sole conduit for news of abuses. In that era, families of abuse victims often went to Ebadi first. She brought prominence to their cases by taking them to trial and speaking to journalists who in turn covered the proceedings. If the world learned about the cases of rape and extrajudicial killings that made...