Sitting in his high-rise apartment overlooking the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, Cóman Kenny can still remember the first time he felt excitement course through him at the prospect of a career as a lawyer. It struck him while listening to a radio interview with Mary Robinson that this was a life for him.
“It was sometime in my teens that I heard that interview. I was aware that Mary Robinson had been a lawyer and academic before becoming president, but more than that I did not know. And yet the moment she began to talk about law as a vocation for social justice, I was transfixed.”
What the former president achieved in those few minutes, Kenny recalls, was to lift the image of law clear of the dusty world of wills, deeds and conveyancing, into a realm where committed lawyers at the height of their careers had the power to change the world – for the better.
“The economy was improving and I suppose I had a bit more leeway in choosing a career than my four older siblings had had. Suddenly, that sense of responsibility I’d felt even in national school when we collected for famine relief made sense. I was drawn to law that could make a difference.”
From a law degree at NUI Galway, to an LLM at Leiden University in the Netherlands, to qualification from King's Inns as a barrister, that sense of commitment never deserted Kenny. Nor has international law ever failed to produce the intellectual challenge he craved from the start.
Still aged just 30, that path from rural north Roscommon has already led him to the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and most recently to join the prosecution team at the exotically named Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, better known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.
If ever a court faced the almost-indescribable challenge of looking into the soul of a systematically terrorised people, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal – even more than the Yugoslav Tribunal – must be it.
In 2014, two of the party’s leaders, Nuon Chea and Kheiu Samphan, were jailed for life for crimes against humanity, specifically the slaughter of almost two million Cambodians - nearly a quarter of the population - at the time of the infamous “Killing Fields” between 1975 and 1979.
Every bit as appalling as this genocide-as-government-policy was the diabolical social engineering attempted by Pol Pot and his communist fundamentalist leadership, which led to famine instead of agricultural reform and self-sufficiency – and regular purges against so-called “subversive elements”.
Scathing criticism
Though the importance of justice for the victims – anyone who suffered “physical, psychological or material harm” as a direct consequence of the crimes committed by the Khmer leadership – is acknowledged by virtually all, the court has come in for scathing criticism.
Although formally established in 1997, its first judges were not sworn in until 2006. There have been allegations of political pressure and interference. The standards of its proceedings have been challenged. The progress of its cases has been “glacial” (a term often applied too to justice in The Hague) and hugely expensive – to the extent that donor fatigue threatens to bring it grinding unceremoniously to a halt.
“It’s true that many of the accused are elderly, that the events took place more than 30 years ago, and that the younger generation trying to eke out a living in an emerging country probably wonder why such resources are going into the court,” says Kenny.
“However, none of that, in my view, takes away from what the court is attempting to do. When you see the victims come to court, when you read their statements, when you watch as they hear their stories aired for the first time in a judicial setting, that is when you see why its goal is not just worthwhile but admirable. “There’s no doubt: absence of accountability fosters a climate in which wrongs gradually come to be regarded as acceptable, and in which society, as a result, gradually minimises its perception of the damage to victims. That leads to secondary victimisation and the perpetuation of prejudice. In that sense, a reckoning is essential.”
Strange coincidence
By a strange coincidence, Kenny will not be the only Irish lawyer on the prosecution team this autumn. It’s also being joined by Fergal Gaynor, who represented the victims of post-election violence in
Kenya
in the International Criminal Court (ICC) case against President Uhuru Kenyatta that collapsed for lack of evidence last December. Both men will be joined by Maureen Harding Clarke SC, who served as a judge at the ICC before being appointed to the
High Court
in Dublin in 2006. Judge Clarke becomes a reserve international co-investigating judge.
But if Mary Robinson was the lawyer who sparked Kenny's career, the lawyer who has earned his gratitude perhaps more than any other is American prosecutor Nick Koumjian, who showed him the ropes in his "first paying job" at the Special Court for Sierra Leone – and is now his boss once again in Phnom Penh.
“Whenever I look back on my career in the future, I know I will regard the moment I joined the Sierra Leone court as a game-changer. It’s extremely difficult to go from unpaid to paid work in this field. I’d already worked unpaid for a year and a half, as an intern and as a legal advisor to an NGO, and I knew it couldn’t continue.
"It must have been the alignment of the stars. The prosecutor, Brenda Hollis, was formidable and always willing to listen. Nick Koumjian gave me responsibility and had faith in my work. That motivated me. I'm still early in my career, but I doubt that I'll ever learn so much again so quickly."