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Doreen Chen is an Australian human rights lawyer based in France. With Rodolphe Prom and Silvia Palomba, she co-founded and co-directs the NGO Destination Justice, which has worked since 2011 with a wide range of talented young professionals to advance rule of law, access to justice, and access to information in Cambodia and beyond. Among their many achievements, they hand-built the Justice Café, a safe space and resource center for changemakers in the making; published the first Annotated Cambodian Constitution and Revealing the Rainbow, a comprehensive report analyzing the human rights situation of Southeast Asia’s LGBTIQ communities and their human rights defenders.
Ms. Chen currently serves as the International Lawyer to Nuon Chea, the senior-surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge, at the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal (known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia). She had previously served for nearly five years as Nuon Chea’s Senior Legal Consultant, including as principal drafter of the 550-page Closing Brief in his trial on genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Her wider practice focuses on representing persecuted human rights defenders and vulnerable communities in Asia. She has also served as Lead Prosecutor at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar, which examined serious crimes committed against the Rohingya, Kachin, and other Myanmar Muslim groups. Ms. Chen is also the current Coordinator for International Law with the Free Rohingya Coalition.
Ms. Chen holds an LLM with honors from Columbia University and honors degrees in government and international relations and law from the University of Sydney.
Responding to the Rohingya Crisis: Toward Human-Centered Accountability
This article examines the issue of accountability as it relates to crimes committed against the Rohingya. The article discusses the idea of accountability, considers lessons that can be derived from the Cambodia experience, and argues strongly in favor of a human-centered approach to accountability for Rohingya and for victims/survivors of other atrocities.
