About half a million Cambodians have attended hearings or outreach activities about the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) since public hearings began in 2009. Countless more have watched the trials unfold on television, and increasingly on social media. To date, the majority of conversations around the legacy of the ECCC have come from international scholars focusing on the legal impact the trials may have. This article instead presents the often-missing views of Cambodian youth about the Tribunal. It also, more broadly, explores the ECCC’s impact on education and young people’s understanding of history. Based on research carried out with university students, this article argues that the contribution of the ECCC to education has often been overlooked and is in fact one of its most significant legacies. In Cambodia, government and non-government organizations, as well as academic institutions, have the unique opportunity to incorporate testimony, footage, and documents from the ECCC into their programmes, greatly adding to the existing repertoire of Khmer-language resources dealing with the past. The result is a more well-rounded programme of transitional justice and reconciliation than the court alone could have provided, and certainly a higher level of external resilience than would have occurred had the court been located outside of Cambodia.

Since the post-Second World War tribunals, only a few scholars have attempted to draw a definitional distinction between international and national criminal courts. Remarkable exceptions include Robert Woetzel, who in 1962 categorized criminal courts according to ‘the involvement of the international community’, and Sarah Williams, who 50 years later relied on the same factor in her definitions of ‘hybrid’ and ‘internationalized’ criminal tribunals.

Through examples of rulings by the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, this article will demonstrate that ‘the involvement of the international community’ is at best an unhelpful criterion when it comes to resolving questions, e.g. regarding the immunity of state officials and the relevance of domestic law, that require a determination of the legal system in which the court operates.

Instead, it is argued that only criminal tribunals deriving their authority from international law should be labelled ‘international’, while the term ‘national criminal court’ should apply to tribunals set up under national law. This terminology would underline that issues concerning jurisdiction and applicable law must be settled according to each court's constituent document and other relevant sources of law, depending on the legal system to which this document belongs.

The Cambodia Tribunal's co-investigating judges' first order, for the provisional detention of Duch, one of the suspects for the atrocities committed by the regime of Democratic Kampuchea in the 1970s, addresses the application of the doctrines of male captus bene detentus and abuse of process. The order, confirmed by the pre-trial chamber, states, relying on those doctrines, that Duch's unreasonably long prior detention, ordered by the Cambodian Military Court, does not bar his provisional detention by the Cambodia Tribunal. This article argues that the order is in accordance with applications of the relevant doctrines by the international criminal tribunals in similar cases, and that, absent involvement of the international or hybrid tribunal, abuse of process can, and should, only be successfully applied in case of torture or serious mistreatment of the suspect.