Professor Gregory H. Stanton will see one of his life’s major goals achieved next year. A tribunal Gregory Stanton
will be established that will put former leaders of the communist Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime on trial. Two million Cambodians – one quarter of the Cambodian population – died under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, before it was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion.

“I am grateful to have lived to see the Khmer Rouge Tribunal finally established,” Stanton said.

Stanton, UMW’s James Farmer Professor in Human Rights, first witnessed evidence of the mass murders when he served as field director for Church World Service in Cambodia in 1980. He founded the Cambodian Genocide Project in 1981 to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice. During the 1990s, he served in the U.S. State Department, where he drafted the options paper that guided U.S. policy on how to bring the Khmer Rouge to trial.

Since 2002, when Stanton was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, he has served as a legal adviser to the task force that created the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. He drafted the rules of procedure that will be adopted this spring by the judges appointed by the United Nations and the Cambodian government and sworn in last July.

Stanton is president and founder of Genocide Watch, and founder and chairman of the International Campaign to End Genocide. He has been a law professor at Washington and Lee University, American University, and the University of Swaziland.