Illiberal Transitional Justice and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

This opening chapter introduces readers to the two main elements of this book: the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and illiberal transitional justice. Although definitions of transitional justice are very broad, the explanations offered by the literature contain implicit assumptions that transitional justice is being implemented as part of a transition towards liberal democracy. In this book I use the case of Cambodia to challenge these assumptions and propose a new category of illiberal transitional justice. I define illiberal transitional justice to be those mechanisms that sit near the boundary of legitimate and illegitimate mechanisms and which have clear procedural rules and use the language of procedural justice but where powerful people or institutions influence the outcome outside of the defined decision-making system.