Asian regionalism and human rights: the case of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights

Asia has long been the only region without an institutionalized human rights framework.1 Yet it is difficult to envisage the form that a human rights mechanism might take for the whole of such a heterogeneous region. For a subregion such as that already institutionalized by ASEAN, however, the latent possibility for such a mechanism has been the focus of human rights proponents for several decades – a focus that has very recently, in 2009, resulted in an ASEAN human rights body (AHRB): the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (the AICHR).