After years of impunity for perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide, a joint United Nations-Cambodian tribunal was recently launched to try senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge. But what effect do human rights tribunals have on perceptions of justice and mental health in post-conflict settings? Do they help to ameliorate post-conflict distress, by promoting justice and reducing the desire for revenge, or do they re-traumatize survivors? Jeffrey Sonis, M.D., M.P.H., Assistant Professor in the Departments of Social Medicine and Family Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill, explores these questions in his presentation of data from two national cross-sectional studies in Cambodia, conducted prior to the start of the public trials, in 2007 and 2009, on attitudes toward the Khmer Rouge trials and post-traumatic mental health. The abstract of Dr. Sonis’s recent paper on the 2007 national study in Cambodia is available at the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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