BRITISH lawyers appointed to defend the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are to challenge the legal foundations of the international tribunal set up to try them for crimes against humanity.

They have drawn a bitter response from Cambodians who have campaigned for three decades to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice for the murder of an estimated 1.7m people between 1975 and 1979.

“This is all very philosophical,” said Youk Chhang, head of the Cambodia Documentation Centre, which has recorded the bloody excesses of the regime’s killing fields, “but what about the victims?”

At least four surviving leaders of the extreme communist movement are expected to be indicted within months. They include “Duch”, the regime’s head of internal security, who oversaw the torture and murder of 10,499 “spies and traitors” and 2,000 children at the notorious Tuol Sleng detention centre.

Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, died in 1998. But Nuon Chea, his deputy, Ieng Sary, the foreign minister, and Khieu Samphan, the nominal “head of state”, all now in their late seventies, are liable to face trial.

“This is probably the most shaky tribunal in terms of its legal basis,” said Rupert Skilbeck, a war crimes barrister named by the United Nations as principal defender. Skilbeck, 35, and his deputy, Richard Rogers, 37, are controversial figures in Phnom Penh as Cambodia’s rulers and foreign powers wrestle for influence over the verdict of history.

“There has to be a strong defence for a fair trial and there has to be a fair trial for the court to be legitimate,” said Rogers. “That’s important for the victims and for Cambodia.”

The British lawyers argue that there is a fundamental flaw in the tribunal because most of the judges are Cambodians appointed by the present regime.

This condition so worried Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary-general, that the UN negotiated a clause allowing it to withdraw if the process was not free and fair.

“Both sides have pledged to establish a tribunal that meets international standards and will deliver justice to the Cambodian people,” said Helen Jarvis, the tribunal’s chief of public affairs.

She said the rules ensure that verdicts can only be reached unanimously or by a majority including both the Cambodian and foreign judges.

Skilbeck is also to challenge a plan to conduct part of the trial in secret.

On that, at least, the British team is in accord with investigators at the documentation centre, who have built up a massive archive on Khmer Rouge crimes.

“Look at this,” said Youk Chhang, reaching into a box to extract a sheaf of yellowing, handwritten documents. “Statements by villagers naming the Khmer Rouge for killing their husband or wife, 1.6m of them, each one signed and with a thumbprint. They have waited for this day. We have to have this court. For us, it is a classroom.”

The two defenders have yet to meet their clients, but Nuon Chea gave a hint of his defence strategy in an interview: “It was not us who killed our people. Our enemies killed them.”

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