The International Council on Archives - Section on Archives and Human Rights invites you to its next conference on Tuesday December 5, 2023 at 4:00 p.m. (Central European Time):
Song Pheaktra and Helen Jarvis: The use of the Khmer Rouge archives as judicial evidence by the People's Revolutionary Tribunal (1979) and the Extraordinary Chambers for the Courts of Cambodia (2007-2022)
Song Pheaktra will introduce the various categories of documents left behind by the Khmer Rouge when they left the S-21 prison (including so-called confessions; biographies; photographs; guard notebooks and name lists of over 18,000 prisoners), which have now been digitised and made available on the museum's web site. Helen Jarvis will then go on to discuss how these archives provided crucial evidence of the crimes committed in two major trials: the world's first genocide tribunal in 1979, later verified in more detail in the recently concluded hybrid Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. These archives were inscribed on both regional and international registers of UNESCO's Memory of the World, and the museum was the recipient of the 2020 UNESCO/MoW Jikji Prize for preservation of documentary heritage.
Biographies
Song Pheaktra graduated from the Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2022 with a Master Degree in History. In 2016, he began his career working with local NGOs on ethnic minority research and documentation, and later he moved to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. In 2018, he was appointed to be head of archives section and is in charge of several research projects at the museum. He leads the team of 12 staff to collect, preserve, digitise and the use of archival materials of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum which is now recognized as the biggest archives existing from the Khmer Rouge regime. Pheaktra combines history and archives skill in his academic life. He participated in many seminars, workshops and training sessions on the archival profession, for example in September 2023 he joined a comprehensive course on Record and Archives Management in the Haute École de gestion de Genève, Switzerland. In 2021, he presented his master thesis on “S-21 Documentation and the Early Development of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archives in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea”.
Helen Jarvis, PhD University of Sydney, BA (Hons) Australian National University, Associate of the Library Association of Australia and former Head of the School of Information, Library and Archive Studies at the University of New South Wales. Helen is currently Chair of the Register Sub-Committee of Memory of the World’s Regional Committee for Asia and the Pacific (MOWCAP) and was a member of MoW’s International Advisory Committee (2013-2018). Since the mid-1990s, Helen has worked in Cambodia on cultural heritage and documentation and justice for genocide. She was Documentation Consultant for Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program; a member of the Cambodian Government Task Force for the Khmer Rouge Trials; and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) as Chief of Public Affairs and then Chief of the Victims’ Support Section. She works closely with Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in matters relating to archives and documentation. She was the author of the chapter “The Pathway to the Recommendation concerning the preservation of, and access to, documentary heritage including in digital form”, in The UNESCO Memory of the World programme : key aspects and developments, edited by Ray Edmondson, Lothar Jordan and Anca Claudia Prodan. (Heritage Studies Series) Cham, Switzerland : Springer, 2020. She holds both Australian and Cambodian nationality and is an Adviser to the Royal Government of Cambodia.
Presentation will be delivered in English. Interpretation into other languages is not available
Pre-register in the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QtunRJs3RAyjZ7enAbBRXw.
This conference will be recorded and published in the SAHR's playlist of ICA's YouTube channel.