An emerging Asian human rights regime as a tool for protecting the vulnerable in Asia?

This chapter challenges the notion that the relatively slow institutionalisation of human rights in Asia reflects a distinctly Asian approach to human rights. The obstacles to human rights institutionalisation and enforcement in Asia are similar to barriers to the effective promotion and protection of human rights at the global level and in regional regimes elsewhere. The limitations of the emerging Asian human rights regime, involving a limited number of institutions governed by ambivalent norms with weak enforcement mechanisms, are shared, to varying degrees, with international human rights law as institutionalised in the UN system and in other regional regimes.