Phnom Penh - Attorneys for a former Khmer Rouge leader on Wednesday accused judges at Cambodia's UN-backed genocide tribunal of undermining the court's transparency by ordering the defence team to remove legal documents from the defence's website. Attorneys for former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary said in a statement that judges had acted with "flawed legal reasoning."
A court statement released a day earlier said defence lawyers Michael Karnavas and Ang Udom faced sanctions unless the documents were removed within 48 hours from the website on Ieng Sary's defence that the lawyers had set up.
The attorneys said the documents had to do with Ieng Sary's health and the admissibility of a psychiatric assessment of the defendant.
"The Ieng Sary defence will not shy away from making a small but important contribution to public and transparent judicial proceedings," Wednesday's statement said. "Nor will we give in to attempts, deliberate or inadvertent, to limit our right to speak out publicly to protect our client's interests."
The judges called the documents confidential, but the statement argued otherwise but added the documents had been removed from the website.
The website was accessible Wednesday evening, but the documents were not on it.
According to the site's mission statement, it was set up because of the judges' unwillingness to make public "defence filings which may be embarrassing or which call into question the legitimacy and judiciousness of acts and decisions of the judges."
Ieng Sary, 83, is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders facing trial for their roles in the deaths of up to 2 million people through execution, starvation or overwork during the ultra-Maoist group's 1975-1979 reign.
The former schoolteacher has been hospitalized seven times since being arrested in August 2007 and was declared medically unfit to attend a pre-trial hearing in Phnom Penh last week.
The hearing was adjourned until April 2.
The defence lawyers' statement also accused the judges of inopportune timing after they issued their order after Karnavas had left the country after the adjourned pre-trial hearing.
"By filing this submission at the precise time that Mr Karnavas was on a plane back to The Netherlands suggests that this timing was a tactical decision," the statement charged.
