Complexities

When the court closed Case Two last year, tribunal officials said the case file of 350,000 documents would make this the most complex since the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis.

There are other complexities too. For a start the tribunal has recently been wracked by divisions over its handling of two more cases - known as Cases Three and Four. The Cambodian government has long said it would not permit those last cases to proceed because they could threaten the country’s stability.

Investigating judges have been accused of deliberately undermining the cases because of political pressure. Several U.N. staff member recently quit the investigations office in response, and there are fears that the court's handling of Cases Three and Four could damage its legacy.

Another challenge is that all four defendants are elderly, between 79 and 85 years old, and none is in robust health. The trial will likely take several years, and there are fears one or more could die before it ends.

That is what happened in the trial of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague, as well as with a number of defendants at the Rwanda tribunal.

OSJI’s Duffy says a new rule will allow convictions or acquittals to be delivered against the accused as the trial proceeds. So unless a defendant dies very early on, they would either be convicted or acquitted of certain crimes prior to the trial’s conclusion.