Last month marked 50 years since the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, an event that marked a sorry turning point for the trajectory of justice in the country.
Decades later, that legacy still lingers in Cambodia’s justice system, but it didn’t have to be that way.
In January 2013, I stood outside Cambodia’s largest prison with one of the country’s few criminal defense lawyers. We were waiting for the release of a 23-year-old man who had spent five years behind bars. He had been found innocent twice: first at trial, then again on appeal. By the time he walked free, his youth had been lost and his life irreparably changed by a system that simply did not see him.
His story is not an anomaly.
I was in Cambodia as part of an Australian government development program, working alongside local lawyers to help bring basic fair trial rights into courtrooms. They stood between the state and the most vulnerable and were at the forefront of change.
Cambodia’s legal system was almost destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, who ruled the country from April 1975 until early 1979. Law schools were demolished and nearly all legal professionals who hadn’t already fled the country were executed. What was lost wasn’t just human capital, but legal culture itself. Fundamental concepts like the presumption of innocence, legal representation, or judicial independence were erased from public consciousness. The 1991 Paris Peace Agreements promised democracy, but rebuilding the legal sector, especially the cultural shift it required, was deeply underestimated.
For decades, donors poured funding into rebuilding the Cambodian judiciary. Australia helped construct courthouses and prisons, and trained police and prison officials. Some progress followed: prison conditions modestly improved and fair trial rights began to take root. But support was fragmented and vulnerable to shifting political priorities.
By 2016, donor fatigue had set in, and funding disappeared.
In 2016, Cambodia had about 60 civil society lawyers. By 2023, only 16 remained. And now, following the destruction of USAID by President Donald Trump and the withdrawal of the Swedish development agency SIDA last year, funding for civil society lawyers has all but disappeared.
This support helped to bring positive changes that I have seen up close. When I began working in Cambodia’s courts, defense lawyers were barely tolerated. One courtroom had a 100 percent conviction rate. But within four months, after consistent legal representation from civil society organizations (CSOs), that same courtroom saw 16 dismissals.
That shift didn’t come from sweeping institutional reform. It came because CSO lawyers showed up and quietly pushed the system toward greater fairness. Their work isn’t visible in the big numbers you see from mass training programs, but it shifts norms in lasting ways.
We often frame justice reform as fixing broken systems. But many of these systems aren’t broken, they’re working exactly as designed: to concentrate power, to exclude, to suppress. It isn’t a glitch in the machine. It is how the machine is intended to work.
That’s why real reform rises from the margins. From people who keep turning up in courtrooms and prisons despite overwhelming odds.
Despite the withdrawal of important sources of foreign support in recent months, grassroots organizations haven’t fallen apart. Incredibly, they’re reorganizing to survive. They lack sustainability tools and networks for diversifying their funding, but they’re resilient, staying when others leave.
Some argue that directly funding civil society actors lacks accountability or risks undermining national institutions. Others say legal aid is a state responsibility. These concerns deserve attention. But they misunderstand the reality on the ground.
In places where state institutions are captured or unwilling to uphold justice, CSO lawyers aren’t undermining legitimacy, they’re upholding it. They bring deep local knowledge and greater accountability than state actors. Safeguards for human rights defenders must be built into donor strategies.
Australia doesn’t need to choose between walking away and propping up a broken system. There’s a third path: invest in those already driving change from within.
Funding should go directly to civil society organizations and grassroots defenders. It should be long-term, flexible, and rooted in local priorities. These are the people making the rule of law a lived reality for those without a voice.
Support must include protection. These defenders are harassed, surveilled, and intimidated. Without safeguards, their work isn’t just underfunded, it risks being silenced.
This is not charity. It is strategy. Backing local actors with legitimacy, trust, and lived experience means investing in justice that is more sustainable, more accountable, and more real.
Everyone I work with remembers what it means to lose everything. And they also know what it takes to rebuild.
The rebuilding hasn’t stopped. The only question is whether we’ll show up too.