Volume 22(2) On the genealogy of human rights 143 Volume 22(2) Victims’ rights, victim collectives and utopic disruption at the ECCC 143 Victims’ rights, victim collectives and utopic disruption at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia Rachel Hughes* This article examines victim participation at Cambodia’s hybrid tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The tribunal — which attempts to bring former Khmer Rouge to justice for crimes committed between 1975 and 1979 — has invited significant participation by ‘victims’ and has provoked new public debate about the past, ongoing suffering and reparation. The participation of collectives of victims, and the collective nature of their participation, are here considered as interventions in the immanent utopic processes of the ECCC. These interventions produce new claims for reparation, claims that exceed extant human rights discourses in Cambodia and confront dominant economic and socio-political conditions. Keywords: Cambodia, victims’ rights, victim participation, ECCC, reparation, utopia Introduction The theoretical claim of this article is that victim participation in internationalised criminal tribunals is utopic, where utopia is considered ‘a distinctive type of process in which something better is not-yet and thus has disruptive, excessive qualities even as it is immanent to lived and material culture at multiple scales’ (Anderson 2006, 698, emphasis in original). The empirical subject of this article is the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT), more correctly known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Jointly designed, funded and staffed by Cambodia and the United Nations, it seeks justice for the victims of Khmer Rouge crimes committed between 1975 and 1979. The ECCC is increasingly well known for its victim participation provision, being the first internationalised criminal tribunal in which victims can join the proceedings, being known as ‘civil parties’. A number of authors * Senior Research Fellow, School of Geography, the University of Melbourne. Email: hughesr@unimelb.edu.au. Thank you to my fellow participants at the Promises and Utopias in Human Rights Workshop, and particularly to Ben Authers, Maria Elander and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.