David Cohen has taught at the University of California, Berkeley since 1979. At UC Berkeley he is the Ancker Distinguished Professor for the Humanities and the founding Director of the Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center. Since 2000 he has collaborated on human rights projects in Asia with the East-West Center in Honolulu, a federally funded Asia-Pacific research center. There he serves as Director of the Asian International Justice Initiative and as Senior Fellow in International Law. From September 1, 2009 he will also be a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The War Crimes Studies Center and the Hoover Library and Archive are already collaborating on archival and IT projects in Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, and China.
Cohen's involvement in research in war crimes tribunals began in the mid 1990's with a project to collect the records of the national war crimes programs conducted in approximately 20 countries in Europe and Asia after WWII. This project led to the creation of the Documentation Center for War Crimes Trials at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, co-directed by Cohen and Prof. Dieter Simon, and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. After successful completion of a pilot project of acquisitions, Cohen and Simon created a follow-on Center at the University of Marburg and Cohen founded the War Crimes Studies Center at UC Berkeley (2000).
While the War Crimes Studies Center has continued (in collaboration with Marburg) to collect materials from the WWII war crimes trials, the major activities of the Center since 2001 have largely focused on contemporary tribunals. In 2001 Cohen began traveling regularly to East Timor to monitor and report on the UN Special Panels for Serious Crimes, culminating in the monograph Indifference and Accountability: The United Nations and the Politics of International Justice in East Timor (2006). Other Timor projects continue. While the East Timor trials were underway, Indonesia created a new court, the Jakarta Ad Hoc Human Rights Court, to try individuals for crimes against humanity committed in East Timor in 1999. Cohen monitored these trials as well, and published the monograph, Intended to Fail: Trials before the Jakarta Ad Hoc Human Rights Court (2004). Cohen's engagement with these tribunals led to his appointment as Expert Advisor to the Commission on Truth and Friendship, established by the Presidents of Timor Leste and Indonesia.
Cohen's involvement with the Jakarta Ad Hoc Human Rights Court also led to what has become a multi-year program of human rights training for the Indonesian judiciary and other institutions that began in 2003 and continues to today. This program currently encompasses:
- A 5 year human rights training program for judges, prosecutors, and police in partnership with the Supreme Court of Indonesia
- A 2 year human rights and conflict prevention training program for police, military, judges, prosecutors, Komnas HAM, and civil society in Papua
- An ongoing human rights training program under the auspices of the Attorney General's Office
- A 3 year training and seminar program for the National Commission on Witness and Victim Protection
- Workshops and other forms of expert and technical support for the Ministry of Law and Human Rights to assist in the construction of a national human rights database and dissemination of human rights information to the Indonesian public.
In addition to the projects in Indonesia and East Timor, the War Crimes Studies Center has been continuously monitoring the trials before the Special Court for Sierra Leone since the inception of the trials in 2004.
Over the past 3 years a major focus for Cohen has been work in support of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Projects Cohen is directing at the ECCC include:
- Training for the international and Cambodian judges, investigating judges, and prosecutors. Training for Cambodian defense counsel. There have been a total of 12 training workshops over the past 2 ½ years.
- Community outreach in support of the ECCC. In the pre-trial phase we made 5 films about the court that were shown on Cambodia's largest TV network (CTN) and in community meetings in 20 provinces. Since the beginning of the Duch trial we have made a film every week, shown in a talk-show format with trial highlights and commentary, on CTN, with approximately 2.5-3 million viewers per week.
- Trial monitoring of the proceedings. Our monitoring team of 4 Cambodian and 6 international monitors from Asia, Europe and America, attends court every day and publishes weekly trial reports in Khmer, English, Chinese, and Bahasa Indonesia.
- In partnership with the ECCC's legacy program, we are developing the Virtual Tribunal, an interactive multimedia educational software platform to make the archival record of the tribunal accessible and meaningful to the Cambodian public and international users.
Finally, at the regional level, Cohen has been tasked, by the ASEAN Secretariat and the USAID Technical Facility to the ASEAN Secretariat, with forming and leading an expert group to create a Human Rights Resource Center for ASEAN. That process is well underway and it is anticipated that the Resource Center will be in operation by mid 2010. Cohen also directs the Summer Institute in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, a regionally focused summer course held in Southeast Asia every year in partnership with a local institution, currently the National Human Rights Commission of Indonesia (2009 and 2010).
