ABSTRACT
Introduction In the late 1980s and 1990s, Southeast Asian state leaders were not only reluctant to acknowledge the universality of human rights; they also criticized the West for imposing its conceptions of rights onto Asia. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Indonesian President Suharto, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, among others, argued that human rights are culturally specific and Asian societies have a “unique,” “special” set of values that does not fit with Western human rights ideals (Christie 1995; Mauzy 1997; Thompson 2001, Peerenboom 2003). They also accused the West of embarking on a new form of colonialism. In what finally became known as the “Asian values debate” they argued that Asian societies place much greater emphasis on the community than on the individual and privilege order, and on social harmony over personal freedom. They also claimed that stability and economic development are necessary preconditions for political rights and democratization – thus reversing the notion of “first-generation” and “second-generation” rights often used in Western discourses, which put civil and political rights in the first place. Accordingly, the Asian values debate – though often descending into blunt culturalist assumptions and self-serving rhetoric – has revealed a genuine normative contestation over rights in the region (Christie 1995; Mauzy 1997; Eldridge 2002; Thompson 2001; Kingsbury 2009). Although the Asian values debate slipped off the public agenda during the Asian financial crisis in 1997/1998, controversies over human rights remained. Political struggles played out as a multilayered contest over state and regime authority between numerous actors. While civil societies in the region have shown a strong commitment to universalism and began to advocate for human rights as early as the late 1980s and early 1990s (Gomez and Ramcharan 2012), most authoritarian states only reluctantly addressed human rights issues. Yet much has changed since the late 1990s. While human rights issues became much more important, particularly in light of growing state abuses, the discourse became more standardized, reflecting an increasingly globalized norm. In the first decade of the new millennium, Southeast Asian states seem to have taken substantial steps toward human rights. A number of states have established
National Human Rights Institutions (NRHI). Regionally, the new ASEAN Charter of 2007 listed human rights as a fundamental goal of the organization and called for the establishment of a regional human rights body. In 2009, Southeast Asian states created the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights and, in 2012, they released the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (Renshaw 2013; Ciorciari 2012). All these developments seem to indicate that human rights are now firmly embedded in the political discourse of the region, and human rights are on the political agenda of Southeast Asian states. Have these developments also improved the human rights situation in the region? This chapter aims to give a more nuanced view of human rights compliance in Southeast Asia. I argue that the commitment of most Southeast Asian states to human rights is still rhetorical or tactical, and there continues to be a deep divide between ratified standards and actual rights practice. Compliance is conceptualized as a continuum involving, in sequential steps, the ratification of human rights treaties, the fulfillment of reporting requests by supervisory bodies, the implementation of norms in domestic law and rule-consistent behavior on the domestic level (Kent 1999: 236; Risse and Sikking 1999). While there is a general consensus in the literature that the commitment to the international human rights system1 has consistently increased, there is still much debate over how to explain gaps between rhetorical and actual compliance understood as rule-consistent behavior. Some human rights scholars have maintained that noncompliance and “decoupling” between norms and behavior is the rule (HafnerBurton and Tsutsui 2005), while others contend that international institutions and transnational advocacy networks are effective in socializing states into ruleconsistent behavior (Risse and Sikking 1999; Jetschke 2011). Recently, scholars have also emphasized that National Human Rights Institutions (NHRI) may play an important role in increasing state compliance (Cole and Ramirez 2013). They are meant to serve as a bridge between international human rights law and domestic human rights practice, and to help localize human rights. This chapter demonstrates that this optimistic view is misplaced and political conflicts about human rights are still fought – not in the international arena between the West and Asian societies, but between local civil societies, domestic human rights institutions, and the various authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, it provides an overview of compliance, which is understood as the ratification of major human rights instruments. It is shown that increasingly more states in Southeast Asia have signed the most important treaties of the international human rights regime. Second, the analysis shifts to the origin, mandate, and impact of National Human Rights Institutions (NHRI) that have been established in the last two decades. I discuss how they translate international human rights law into a domestic human rights landscape. Finally, human rights practices are analyzed using data from Freedom House (FH) and the Political Terror Scale (PTS). Moreover, this chapter also looks at the reports of the Universal Periodic Review in order to illustrate the major human rights concerns of Southeast Asian states.
