Pedophile Lawyer Laments Decline in Cases

PHNOM PENH (Khmer Times) – Dun Vibol occupies a rare – and very lucrative – legal niche: defending men accused of pedophilia.

Over the course of his career, he’s handled around 100 child cases, working mostly for foreigners, but also Cambodians.

Mr. Vibol started defending accused pedophiles in 2007, just a year into his career, when he was a hotshot rookie eager to tackle a challenging case. Since then, he has become an expert on sex-crime laws.

“It’s very hard to defend those people,” he said, referring to child molesters.

Why Keep at it?

“You can say it is my specialty right now,” he said. “I have some experience. I know about the law, how to deal with the judge and all the people in the suit.”

Legal fees for pedophile cases are high, due to their complexities. Fees range from $3,000 to $5,000, exculding appeals.

Convicted clients appeal 100 percent of the time, Mr. Vibol said. Non-pedophile cases net him just $1,000 to $2,000 each.

Lately, his workload has dried up due to increased competition and more effective law enforcement, which is deterring perpetrators. Foreign pedophiles, the most lucrative source of income, are increasingly scarce, the lawyer said.

“Foreigner cases are going down right now, but Cambodian national cases are staying steady.”

Mr. Vibol has worked on at least 10 cases per year. In the last year, however, he only received four new clients. To keep the fees flowing, he is focusing on appeals for clients in jail.

Legal Maneuvers

Mr. Vibol is often up against NGO lawyers, who represent virtually all child abuse victims here. His strategy has featured assertions that his clients were set up by rapacious NGOs eager to catch a predator to win foreign donations – not help victims.

“NGOs know that the girl is a street prostitute, but they don’t bring her to the center for the government to take care of her,” he said. “They let her stay in the street and work as a prostitute.”

Street prostitution cases dominate Mr. Vibol’s work with accused pedophiles. Despite greater police vigilance, he said, this commerce still thrives.

The lawyer complained that it is hard to acquit people even in the face of weak evidence. Cambodian courts give great weight to police statements and almost no consideration to what lawyers provide, while judges tend to be swayed by public opinion.

“They always claim that the case is a high profile case,” he said. The people involved “affect society, and NGOs are involved, and [judges] don’t want criticism.”

Mr. Vibol tries to reduce punishment for his clients either in the primary sentencing or on appeal. In most cases, it’s possible to knock a few years off the prison term.

The penalty for abusing a victim under age of 15 is a minimum of seven years in jail. But judges have the power to reduce a sentence. In at least 10 percent of all cases here, a convicted pedophile gets just one or two years in prison, said Mr. Vibol.

Deportation of foreign nationals convicted of pedophilia is now a hot-button topic, but Mr. Vibol said that deportation does not always happen if the judge deems molesters are not a threat.

The lawyer supports mandatory deportation for convicted pedophiles, but said it’s a moot point. After a taste of Cambodian jails, very few people have any desire to stay here.

“They never want to continue to stay in Cambodia,” he said. “They cannot believe… that the law, the police would allow them to stay quietly.”



Mr. Vibol, who has children of his own, said that he can separate his professional and personal life. In cases he has worked on, the victim’s circumstances are very different from those of his children. Most victims are poor and from the countryside, not from urban professional families. “It’s not my kind of situation,” he said.