Phnom Penh: He has been convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail over the deaths of at least 1.7 million people.
But though he is ailing and frail, 90-year-old Nuon Chea has still been able to latch onto the latest media trend, recently lashing out at the partly Australian-funded tribunal into Khmer Rouge crimes in Cambodia by labelling its allegations "fake news".
In a leaked confidential 550-page closing paper, Pol Pot's second-in-command attempts to rewrite the history of the Khmer Rouge's demented pursuit of an agrarian utopia in the 1970s.
The tribunal had "blindly regurgitated" historically inaccurate and false claims by Vietnam, the former US-backed Cambodian government and a handful of Anglo-French books, films and exhibitions that painted the organisation as a "monstrous regime intent on harming its people", Nuon Chea's lawyers write.
The document mocks evidence accusing the Khmer Rouge of dismembering children, extracting and eating the livers of enemies, butchering entire families, looting hospitals and schools and throwing people to crocodiles in what became known as the Killing Fields.
"In a precursor to today's fake news", the paper says, Vietnam's powerful and systematic propaganda unfairly portrayed the Khmer Rouge as a genocidal regime to justify Hanoi's 1978 invasion of the country.
As well as Vietnam's "imperialist ambitions", the document describes the United States' bombing of Cambodia between 1965 and 1975 as a "root cause" of the country's upheaval, supposedly killing hundreds of thousands Cambodians, leaving people starving and the country on the brink of collapse.
The claims are sure to further anger thousands of victims of Khmer Rouge atrocities when the tribunal publishes a redacted version on its website.
It will also raise fresh questions about the United Nations-backed tribunal providing a soapbox for a man already convicted over one of the worst episodes of mass killing in the 20th century.
The tribunal has spent almost $300 million and taken a decade to obtain convictions against just three men, including Nuon Chea.
Bou Meng, a 77-year-old painter who was one of only a handful of survivors of Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge's main prison and torture centre in Phnom Penh, says the tribunal is a "waste of time and money", although he would still like more of the organisation's leaders brought to justice.
"The tribunal hasn't come up with policies to benefit the next generation of Cambodians," he says, sitting behind a stand selling his book in Tuol Sleng, now a Museum of Genocide which has been visited by millions of tourists.
Prosecutors have countered Nuon Chea's claims in a 793-page closing paper where they tell the judges that he and the Khmer Rouge's 85-year-old former head of state, Khieu Samphan, should be held legally and morally responsible for the horrors inflicted on Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.
They describe Nuon Chea's defence as "morally abhorrent", adding: "What can justify government leaders treating their own people as expendable commodities to be used to labour, fed only when convenient, bred to increase the population and disposed of whenever suspected of lacking loyalty to the leadership that inflicted such suffering?"
Despite being billed as one of the largest hearings of its kind since the Nuremberg trials of prominent Nazis, the tribunal's judges admit they hold "deep concerns" about a shortfall in funding and the future of other cases, including that of Meas Muth, a Khmer Rouge commander accused of mass killings.
Meas Muth was chief of the Khmer Rouge navy when his men captured a number of foreigners, including Australians Ronald Keith Dean and David Lloyd Scott, after their yacht strayed into Cambodian waters in 1978.
Bou Meng remembers the day one of the foreigners was dragged to Tuol Sleng's front gate, where tyres were pushed on to his body and he was burnt alive.
"They died. Among them only I am alive," Bou Meng says.
Australia has so far contributed $35.75 million and pledged another $3.25 million to the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts in Cambodia, as the tribunal is officially known.
But virtually since the day it opened the tribunal has been dogged by allegations of corruption, strikes, bitter internal disagreements, cost blowouts, political interference and glacial progress.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge cadre, has opposed further indictments, warning that expanding the scope of the trial could lead to civil war.
In his paper, Nuon Chea railed against the tribunal for refusing to call Hun Sen and other former Khmer Rouge cadres who have occupied top positions in the government and military for the last three decades.
The paper describes the tribunal as being a "profoundly broken and close-minded institution" that has been disinterested in the truth since Nuon Chea was put on trial almost 10 years ago.
Aside from Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, the only other person convicted by the tribunal is Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who was the commandant of Tuol Sleng.
He was sentenced in 2012 to life in prison for crimes against humanity.
In their closing arguments, prosecutors say evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan are guilty of crimes including genocide, extermination, enslavement, torture, religious and political persecution and other inhumane acts for which they have shown little remorse.
Prosecutors call for them to be given a second life sentence.
However tribunal observers say given their failing health and ages, the men may not be alive when the judges finally deliver their verdicts after years of hearings.
