The film: With a UN-backed tribunal preparing to hear charges against five of Khmer Rouge's former leaders ('Duch' Kang Kek Lew, who ran the notorious Tuol Sleng prison and torture centre during its reign in Cambodia, testified last week) the release of Terror's Advocate on DVD couldn't be more timely.

A documentary about the life of French lawyer Jacques Verges - whose clients have included Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal and the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic - Barbet Schroeder's film begins with footage of Pol Pot, who describes Verges as 'polite and discreet', and is followed by scenes of the two men embracing and sharing a meal (right).

Verges' zeal for defending people regarded as tyrants and terrorists has earned him the nickname 'the devil's advocate'. Like Schroeder's other documentary about a controversial figure - General Idi Amin Dada, made in 1974 - Terror's Advocate doesn't shy away from the extreme views of its subject, and Verges is shown at his most defiant, revelling in his tactic to 'taunt and provoke' so as to court international attention for his clients.

But Verges is not a vacuous attention-seeker. Born in Thailand and raised on Reunion by his diplomat father and Vietnamese mother, he became a communist and fought for Charles De Gaulle's Free French army during the second world war. He then became an ardent anti-colonial activist involved in the Algerian war of independence, defending militants against the French colonial authorities. Disenchanted with life in independent Algeria, he disappeared for several years before re-emerging as the defence lawyer for a gallery of international pariahs including Palestinian extremists (such as Anis Naccache) and members of the Baader-Meinhof group (such as Magdalena Kopp).

At the end of the film, he says to Schroeder that he would 'even defend Bush' if the incumbent US president were in the dock - 'but only if he's willing to plead guilty'.

Verges says he tried to use the trial of Barbie to compare crimes against French Jews with the way the French tortured, guillotined and massacred the colonial population in Algeria. And the film reveals how he is motivated not necessarily by a belief in his clients' innocence, but by his views on justice against political and military oppression, which he uses his cases to make public.

His indirect but determined approach to his goals is reflected in how Schroeder structures Terror's Advocate, Verges being the prism through which the filmmaker explores terrorism as a product of a convoluted web of global politics.

The extras: With the 130-minute film covering a lot of ground, not much is left for bonus features; there's only a chronology of Verges' life and the political events unfolding in the places that would eventually become his playgrounds.

The verdict: Terror's Advocate is revealing, challenging viewing that may provoke viewers to rethink the notion of terrorism, both how it has been seen and how it has developed over the course of the past century.