Stanford University

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From Archiving to Legacy: The Virtual Tribunal Project at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

  • David Cohen ,
  • Michael Goldsby

Our talk will present an innovative software platform we are developing for use at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal/Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and other international tribunals. The VirtualTribunal takes the archival records of the tribunal, supplements them with other multimedia resources, and converts them into an educational, training, and legacy resource through the construction of modules aimed at specific user groups. We are working with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal to implement the Virtual Tribunal as an educational resource for Cambodian schools, universities, law schools, and judicial training centers, as well as a means for preserving the historical and human legacy of these trials documenting the trauma of the Khmer Rouge regime.

David Cohen is the Director of the War Crimes Studies Center and the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distingusihed Professor for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. The War Crimes Studies Center supports and reports on the work of war crimes and human rights tribunals in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, and Indonesia as well as engaging in a variety of national and regional human rights projects in Southeast Asia. The Virtual Tribunal is a partnership between the War Crimes Studies Center and the Department of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and the Hoover Library and Archive at Stanford.

Michael Goldsby is a senior at UC Berkeley, where he is studying computer science.  He has been working on the Virtual Tribunal Project with Professors Ruzena Bajcsy and David Cohen since early 2008, and is currently the project's lead engineer.  After graduating this year, he plans to travel to Cambodia in order to oversee the project's implementation alongside the international criminal tribunal in Phnom Penh.