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	Corporate social responsibility by Damien Carrick The Law Report   But while we"re all part of one globalised economy, we haven"t yet created a matching global legal system. So when Asian factory workers are denied a living wage, basic work safety conditions or freedom of association, what can they do? And what can you do?   Last week in India, the settlement of a legal dispute between an Indian manufacturing giant and western do-gooders, has focused attention on the rising power of corporations based in the developing world.   Those companies are pumping out the cheap consumer goods that now fill our homes. They"re part of an export miracle that is lifting millions out of poverty in countries like India and China.   But amid all this material plenty, spare a thought for the workers who toil in the Asian factories, those who create our fashionable new clothes, our shiny toys and our latest high-tech electronic gadgets. In southern China, millions of low paid workers live in grim factory complexes.   Apo Leong: the factories and the dorms are surrounded by walls. You can say a barracks, or I"d put it, concentration camp. The workers live there, eat there, and work there, and about eight to ten put in a cubicle in a multi-storey building, and then they can go to work and off to work, and in many cases they are forced to work overtime because the security guards will not let them out.   Damien Carrick: How many millions of people would live in these sorts of conditions, these sorts of barrack-factories, as you"ve described them.   Apo Leong: It"s around 20 million workers, but there"s no official statistics, you know. Many of these workers are migrant workers from the provinces, so employers need to provide dormitories, entertainment and work spaces.   The cheap manufactured goods in our stores are there thanks to a globalised economy of low tariff barriers and free-flowing investment. But while we"re all part of one global economy, we haven"t yet created a matching global legal system or global regulatory system.   So when those Asian factory workers are denied a living wage, denied basic occupational health and safety standards, denied freedom of association or other basic freedoms -- well, frankly, not much can be done.   In the past, consumer-driven campaigns against companies like Nike have pressured brand-name corporations into improving conditions in the hundreds of factories which supply their branded products.. Visit the related web page
	Khmer Rouge victims given a voice in Cambodia trials by Seth Mydans New York Times   June 16, 2008 (Extract)   PHNOM PENH: If Sok Chear had her way, she would slice the elderly man into ribbons and pour salt into his wounds. She would beat him up and torture him and give him electric shocks to make him talk.   For Ly Monysar, "Only killing them will make me feel calm. I want them to suffer the way I suffered. I say this from the heart."   Sok Chear, an office worker, and Ly Monysar, a security guard, are two of the millions of Cambodians who suffered for four years in the late 1970s under the brutal Communist Khmer Rouge, who caused the deaths of 1.7 million people.   Today, three decades later, five aging former Khmer Rouge leaders have been arrested and are awaiting trial. And Sok Chear and Ly Monysar have an innovative role to play in the tribunal, where the first case is expected to get under way this autumn.   They are two of hundreds of people who have applied to the court to be recognized officially as victims of the Khmer Rouge and to bring parallel civil cases against them.   They will have the chance, not to beat and torture them but to seek symbolic reparations - a monument, perhaps, or a museum or a trauma center.   It is a controversial experiment in this unusual hybrid tribunal, which is administered jointly by the United Nations and the Cambodian government, cobbling together elements of both local and international law.   "For the first time in history the internal rules of a tribunal will give victims of crimes the possibility to participate as parties," said Gabriela González Rivas, deputy head of the tribunal''s victims unit.   Victims have been included in other comparable tribunals like the International Court of Justice, but their role has been more limited.   As civil parties, the victims here will have standing comparable to those of the accused, including the rights to participate in the investigation, to be represented by a lawyer, to call witnesses and to question the accused at trial, according to a court statement.   "Participation in these types of proceedings is a tool of empowerment," Rivas said. "People can tell their story, feel that what happened to them is a consideration, a recognizing that what happened to them shouldn''t have happened."   The inclusion of victims is part of the evolution and refining of the mechanisms of international justice, said Diane Orentlicher, special counsel of the Open Society Justice Initiative, in an interview by telephone from New York.   "There has been a growing recognition, after 15 years of international and hybrid courts like this one, not to exclude victims from the justice that is being dispensed on their behalf," she said. "This is one of the frontier issues in ongoing efforts to improve ways in which war crimes trials are carried out."   The Cambodia tribunal has been criticized by some for compromising international standards of justice with its awkward mixture of Cambodian law and its vulnerability to manipulation by the country''s strongman, Prime Minister Hun Sen.   The participation of victims will offer a catharsis and a measure of healing, and will set a base line for an end to impunity in this still raw and sometimes lawless country, a country that has never fully come to grips with its tormented past.   Nearly a year has passed since the first of the five defendants was charged in the case. A new budget has been submitted, and most analysts are confident that more money will be found from international donors to extend the life of the tribunal.   So far, there have been 1,300 applications to participate in the trial from people who say they are victims. About half of them seek to be civil parties, while the other half offer evidence that could be submitted to prosecutors. Most names have been channeled through a documentation center or through human rights groups. Ten people have been accepted so far as civil parties, lawyers said.   As the number grows, it is likely that they will be combined into class actions representing religious or ethnic groups, victims of particular crimes or other parties.   Theary Seng, 37, a Cambodian-born American lawyer who lost her parents to the Khmer Rouge, is organizing two groups of orphans - including Sok Chear and Ly Monysar - to bring civil cases.   In February, Seng became the first - and so far the only - victim to address the court, standing face to face with a man she blames for the deaths of her parents.   Though her words were addressed to the court, she said, her eyes were locked directly with those of the defendant, Nuon Chea, 81, the most senior of the five imprisoned leaders - the man Sok Chear said she wanted to flay.   In a short statement, Theary Seng contrasted the legal protections that Nuon Chea is receiving with the arbitrary arrest and abuse she said she and her younger brother suffered as children under the Khmer Rouge.   Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge ideologue, was sometimes known as Brother No. 2 to Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, who died in 1998.   Nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population died between 1975 and 1979 from execution, torture, starvation and overwork in the mass labor brigades the Khmer Rouge created.   Sok Chear, 32, who said she was raped and brutalized as a girl by the Khmer Rouge, remains inconsolable over the loss of her father, an engineer, who disappeared into the hands of the black-clothed cadre and never returned.   "We were always waiting for him to come home, but he never came," she said. "We were always waiting and waiting. Even now, I still look around. Maybe my father is still alive." Tears still come when she talks about him.   "He gave me rice to eat, and I want to repay him," she said, "even one plate of rice, my gift to him, even one plate for him to eat from his daughter."   Ly Monysar, 41, is a broken man, poor and sick, his voice quivers when he talks of the loss of his entire family when he was a boy of 9. If he could, he would bring his own justice to members of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.
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