The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), an internationalized criminal tribunal established with United Nations assistance and located within the domestic legal system of Cambodia, adopted from its inception an ambitious form of victim participation in its trials of the senior leadership of the Khmer Rouge regime and others most responsible for atrocities committed during the Democratic Kampuchea period. Those urging the adoption of victim participation before the ECCC responded to perceptions that the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia had failed to sufficiently empower victims.1 They also drew inspiration from a much broader movement in recent decades towards the achievement of restorative justice by allowing victims to participate in proceedings and by providing compensation to victims for their harm suffered.2 In addition to involving victims as witnesses and complainants, the ECCC is the first and only internationalized criminal tribunal to follow the civil law practice of including victims as parties to the proceedings.3 The model of victim participation initially adopted before the ECCC permitted extensive rights of participation by victims within the ECCC’s first trial (Case 001)4 and fuelled early hopes that it may represent an innovative model of access to justice for victims in relation to trials of atrocity crimes before international courts and tribunals.5 Experience during the ECCC’s first trial, however, forced a radical retrenchment of this scheme in advance of its second case (against the four surviving members of the Khmer Rouge leadership) in the interests of safeguarding the Trial Chamber’s ability to render any timely verdict in Case 002, the tribunal’s core case. While these reforms successfully neutralized the trial management impact of victim participation and preserved the possibility of obtaining a verdict in Case 002, critical questions remain regarding the overall impact of these measures on a tribunal already overburdened with insuperable trial management and financial challenges, and their efficacy in meeting the core objectives of the victims of Khmer Rouge-era crimes themselves.