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Still, a verdict of genocide in Cambodia, no matter how delayed or limited in scope, carries implications for future prosecutions of crimes against humanity, such as in the cases of Sudan or Myanmar.
“We need to show the world that even if it takes a long time, we can deliver justice,” said Ly Sok Kheang, the director of the Anlong Veng Peace Center and a researcher in peace and reconciliation efforts.
For more than a decade, the United Nations-backed tribunal, called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, has sifted through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, called hundreds of witnesses and heard in exhaustive detail how the Khmer Rouge ran its killing fields.
The entire effort has cost more than $300 million.
Yet the court has convicted just three senior Khmer Rouge leaders of crimes against humanity: Mr. Nuon Chea, Mr. Khieu Samphan and Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, who commanded a prison camp where at least 12,000 people were tortured and ordered to their deaths.
Only five top Khmer Rouge leaders have been arrested and put on trial. But as the court’s deliberations dragged on, the other two elderly defendants died.
With Friday’s judgment, Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia has made clear he would prefer the tribunal to cease its high-profile work. But others would like trials to extend to many lower-ranking officials who are believed to have carried out some of the Khmer Rouge’s most horrific crimes.
Mr. Hun Sen, a onetime Khmer Rouge cadre who has ruled Cambodia for more than three decades, had opposed the formation of the tribunal in the first place. Rather than put Mr. Khieu Samphan and Mr. Nuon Chea on trial, he said in 1998, they should be greeted with “bouquets of flowers, not with prisons and handcuffs.”
