Human Rights and Participatory Politics in Southeast Asia (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights) - Hardcover

Buch 93 von 111: Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

Renshaw, Catherine

 
9780812251036: Human Rights and Participatory Politics in Southeast Asia (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812251032 ISBN 13: 9780812251036
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

In Human Rights and Participatory Politics in Southeast Asia, Catherine Renshaw recounts an extraordinary period of human rights institution-building in Southeast Asia. She begins her account in 2007, when the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed the ASEAN charter, committing members for the first time to principles of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. In 2009, the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights was established with a mandate to uphold internationally recognized human rights standards. In 2013, the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration was adopted as a framework for human rights cooperation in the region and a mechanisim for ASEAN community building. Renshaw explains why these developments emerged when they did and assesses the impact of these institutions in the first decade of their existence.

In her examination of ASEAN, Renshaw asks how human rights can be implemented in and between states that are politically diverse—Vietnam and Laos are Communist; Brunei Darussalam is an Islamic sultanate; Myanmar is in transition from a military dictatorship; the Philippines and Indonesia are established multiparty democracies; while the remaining members are less easily defined. Renshaw cautions that ASEAN is limited in its ability to shape the practices of its members because it lacks a preponderance of democratic states. However, she concludes that, in the absence of a global legalized human rights order, the most significant practical advancements in the promotion of human rights have emerged from regional institutions such as the ASEAN.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Catherine Renshaw is Associate Professor of Law and Deputy Head of the Thomas More Law School at Australian Catholic University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

Southeast Asia, home to the world's newest regional human rights system, has been in tumult in recent years. In Myanmar (Burma), Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in the 2015 general elections, presaging what seemed to be a new democratic dawn for the former pariah state. Two years later, however, the Burmese military carried out a "clearance operation" in the northern part of the country, aimed at driving out the minority Muslim population, the Rohingya. The military torched Rohingya villages, raped women and girls, and used grenades and helicopters to fire on civilians. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called it a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel laureate and human rights icon, refused to criticize the actions of the military.

In neighboring Thailand, the military coup d'état of May 2014 was followed in 2016 by a constitutional referendum in which a majority of Thai people endorsed a continuing role for the military in politics. Under its interim constitution, Thailand is ruled by the National Council for Peace and Order, a military junta, which governs under a regime of surveillance and censorship, restricting media freedom and prohibiting criticism of its actions.

In the Philippines, the presidential elections of May 2016 brought to power Rodrigo Duterte, who began a campaign of state-sanctioned extrajudicial violence against drug addicts and people involved in the drug trade. By 2017, more than thirteen thousand people had been killed in Duterte's war on drugs—more than the number who died during the twenty-year dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. In the communist states of Vietnam and Laos, human rights organizations continue to protest the arrest and imprisonment of political dissidents and activists. In Cambodia, in 2017, authoritarian prime minister Hun Sen consolidated power by arresting the leader of the main opposition party on grounds of treason. Even Indonesia, a moderate Islamic state with a flourishing, multiparty democracy, suddenly seems susceptible to intolerance and political extremism. In December 2016 hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets of Jakarta, demanding the arrest of the city's Chinese Christian governor on charges of blasphemy.

Meanwhile, at the regional level, the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was engaged in an extraordinary flurry of institution building. Long derided as a "club for dictators," ASEAN seemed determined to change its image, and its 2007 charter explicitly links ASEAN's purpose with the strengthening of democracy and the protection of human rights within the region. The charter also provides for the establishment of an ASEAN human rights body, which was inaugurated on October 23, 2009, as the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR). On November 18, 2012, in Phnom Penh, ASEAN adopted its Human Rights Declaration, which states that ASEAN's members affirm all the civil and political rights, and all of the economic, social, and cultural rights, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as other rights specifically relevant to the region, such as the right to a safe, clean, and sustainable environment; the right to development; and the right to peace.

For many reasons, these are remarkable developments. First, Southeast Asia is characterized by a significant degree of political diversity. ASEAN includes two communist states (Vietnam and Laos); an Islamic sultanate (Brunei Darussalam); a democracy in transition from military dictatorship (Myanmar); two established multiparty democracies (the Philippines and Indonesia); and a group of other countries of less easily defined political hue. Among these are Cambodia, which Hun Sen rules under a system described as electoral authoritarianism; Singapore, where only one political party has held power since the countries gained independence; and Thailand, a constitutional monarchy that has experienced multiple coup d'états. ASEAN's members cannot describe themselves in the same way the leaders of Western Europe did at the end of World War II, as "like-minded countries with a common heritage of political traditions, ideals, freedom, and the rule of law."

Second, ASEAN states have traditionally been reluctant to engage with the international human rights treaty monitoring system. Only three of the eight major international human rights treaties have been ratified by all ten ASEAN member states. Even in relation to these treaties, several ASEAN states have entered substantial reservations. Only six ASEAN members have ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Historically, most ASEAN states have been reluctant to subject their human rights policies and practices to external scrutiny.

Third, during the "Asian values" debates of the 1990s, several Southeast Asian leaders openly questioned liberal democracy's emphasis on liberty and autonomy, arguing that these values displace equally important values of familial and communitarian obligation, social order, and harmony. Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, and Indonesia's president Suharto all argued that Asian cultural particularity justified the rejection of liberal democracy and the civil and political rights associated with it. These leaders argued that the welfare of the people depended on economic growth and political stability and that political opposition and the exercise of civil freedoms were detrimental to these. The Asian Values debate drew much of its force from the success in the early 1990s of the "tiger economies" of East and Southeast Asia. When these economies faltered in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the Asian Values debate lost much of its strength. Nonetheless, arguments persist about the particularity of Asian political culture and the unsuitability of some Western political ideals to the circumstances of Southeast Asia.

Against this backdrop, the emergence of a regional human rights system in Southeast Asia has puzzled onlookers, and it has been unclear to what extent these regional developments would affect the domestic behavior of ASEAN states. Optimists hoped that ASEAN would eventually mirror the work of regional organizations such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe, the Organisation of American States, and the Economic Community of West African States in supporting and deepening democracy among their member states. Others, however, observing Southeast Asia's political diversity and noting that democracies "with adjectives" still predominated in ASEAN's membership, viewed the turn to human rights and democracy as at best futile and at worst a danger to regional stability.

Why did these disparate states agree to institutionalize human rights at the regional level? Was it merely a strategy to deflect criticism from the poor human rights records of some ASEAN members, or was it the beginning of a serious regional-level effort to protect and realize the rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? It was unclear how ASEAN's new regional human rights institutions would set about implementing rights in states that are not liberal democracies and addressing fears that ASEAN's new institutions would endorse a different, perhaps lower standard of human rights for Southeast Asia. The overarching question was whether and to what extent ASEAN's new institutions could shape the human rights behavior of member states and improve the lives of the peoples of Southeast Asia. That is the question this book takes up.

Global and Regional Rights Regimes

The creation of a regional human rights body in...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812251032
ISBN 13 
9780812251036
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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preigu
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