When after lengthy adjudication reparations eventually materialise in the locations where the atrocities occurred, survivors’ responses to such reparations vary greatly. Such responses may include relief and celebration, but reparations are just as likely to be met with confusion, contestation and/or rejection. The practices that determine how reparations are conceived significantly influence the responses that victims and others in society develop regarding such reparations. Behind these questions is the dynamic interrelationship between what courts have to offer and what victims accept as reparations. This chapter explores this conundrum by way of three concrete reparative measures considered or implemented in the context of the ECCC’s reparations mandate. In juxtaposing measures that were granted by ECCC judges as reparations and those that were rejected, the chapter shows some of the effects of courts’ practices on the meaning of reparations.

Reparations have forced international(-ised) criminal courts to move beyond their comfort zones and engage with the diverse socio-political and cultural contexts before them. At the core of this process is the courts’ engagement with survivors of mass atrocities, who were largely absent during the negotiations. The first cases before both the ICC and the ECCC were the testing ground for their novel victim participation schemes. This chapter shows that targeting and representational practices have shaped participation, influencing who receives reparations and how these reparations are conceived. The contours of the groups of victims who receive reparations are constructed and continuously contested through practices of juridification and litigation. Moreover, ‘participation’ is carried out through representatives who translate and discipline the multitude of survivor demands for the purposes of courts’ legal proceedings. This chapter focuses on the two groups most involved in such ‘reparational’ practices: NGO ‘intermediaries’, and victims’ legal representatives.

This chapter explores the ECCC’s adjudicative practices regarding reparations. Distinct features of the ECCC are that its judges are based in the country where the crimes occurred and that they appear both as lawmakers, at least in relation to their procedural rules, and adjudicators of these laws. This chapter examines the ECCC’s adjudicative practices in Cases 001 and 002, the latter being tried in two separate sub-trials (Cases 002/01 and 002/02). After observing that their original framework did not deliver tangible reparations to civil parties in Case 001, judges amended the Internal Rules. My examination of the experience in Case 002 provides an account of how this experiment worked out in practice. ECCC judges were ultimately more socially responsive in their decision-making on reparations than their colleagues at the ICC. Yet, the practices they adopted eventually put into question the remedial nature of the reparations awards.

Chapter 2 dwells upon the operationalization of the reparative dimension of international criminal justice at the international level, with a focus on the historical evolution of reparations by international criminal courts and tribunals prior to the ICC, and the reparative justice model devised by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The goal of this chapter is to retrace the diverse models in place in international criminal tribunals in regards to reparations, from a model that excludes reparations from criminal proceedings to one that has a role for victims and encompasses reparative dimensions of justice. Concerning the latter, this chapter analyzes in-depth the reparation regime developed at the ECCC, including the role of parties civiles, and the rich developing case law of the court regarding reparations. This chapter provides a careful analysis of all decisions on reparations and submissions of the parties, it engages with critical scholarship on the system developed at the ECCC, the impact of reparation orders for victims and discusses practical and policy considerations of the types of reparation that can be ordered (collective and moral reparations). It also analyses the partie civile system under which the ECCC operates and discusses the contribution of the evolving case law to the development of reparative justice for international crimes.