SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Rights Issues Loom Over ASEAN Summit

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jan 9 2007 (IPS) - Can a relic of the Cold War reinvent itself to gain a relevant role on the contemporary global stage? The Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) seems to think so as the 10-member bloc prepares to hold its 12th summit over the weekend in the Philippines.

Yet the new direction ASEAN is expected to take following the unveiling of a blueprint for change during the leaders’ meeting, from Jan. 12-15, is already facing questions on a sensitive front – human rights.

Not all the region’s governments are expected to support the sentiments of Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda, who said during meetings with ASEAN officials in late December that human rights issues needed to be addressed to strengthen the bloc’s credentials.

He referred to the regional human rights mechanism in the European Union, the African Union and the Organisation of American States as realities that ASEAN cannot avoid. The bloc groups Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore.

Wirayuda’s view is supported by analysts, who say that the planned ASEAN Charter with weak human rights commitments by its member states and a lack of a common human rights principles to uphold will expose the 40-year-old regional grouping as another talking shop.

”ASEAN should set up a human rights mechanism like Africa and Latin America,’’ Harry Roque, director of the institute of international legal studies at the University of Philippines, said in a telephone interview from Manila. ‘’It is currently redundant in the field of human rights.’’

Others, like a former Thai ambassador to Washington called for an agreement among all ASEAN members to speak a common human rights language. ‘’There is a need for an internal denominator on the human rights front,’’ Kasit Promya told IPS. ‘’Without that, you cannot speak with the same voice and have the same weight. Everything begins at home.’’

In fact, it is to avoid this image of ASEAN as a forum of empty rhetoric that prompted a ranking Singaporean politician to warn leaders that the group risks atrophy if the makeover to transform the bloc into a rules-based body is not implemented. The affluent city-state’s Deputy Prime Minister S. Jeyakumar called for ‘’hard-nosed decisions,’’ reports Singapore’s ‘The Straits Times’ newspaper.

‘’If it just continues to do more of the same, I think over a period of time, ASEAN will just become one of those organisations which will slowly fade into the sunset,’’ he added in the paper’s weekend edition.

Jayakumar is part of the Eminent Persons Group (EPG), a 10-member body of ranking ministers, leaders and diplomats from each ASEAN country, who have spent all of 2006 shaping the new charter. This move to establish a rules-based bloc along the lines of the European Union has even prompted the group of elder statesmen to call for a review of a key feature of ASEAN – its longstanding principle of non-interference.

‘’The EPG wants more robust systems to monitor compliance, settle disputes and penalise those who fail to meet their obligations,’’ the newspaper adds. ‘’It also wants leaders to meet at least twice a year, up from once currently, as part of efforts to restructure ASEAN and make it stronger.’’

The EPG’s proposals to boost ASEAN’s flagging image comes as the regional bloc faces the prospect of being sidelined as a significant Asian player in the wake of two giants – China and India – emerging with impressive economic clout.

This image problem of an irrelevant regional bloc in the post-Cold War age was magnified further by a sudden decision to cancel the 12th ASEAN summit due to be held in December and have it rescheduled for January. Philippines, the host country, blamed the cancellation on a typhoon that threatened to hit the island of Cebu, where the meeting was due to take place.

ASEAN emerged in 1967 with the backing of the United States to fight the Cold War. The founding members who were seen as pivotal by Washington to stall the spread of Communism in the region included Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia. Fear of left-wing ideology saw the U.S. government turn a blind eye towards the fact that all of ASEAN’s founding members, with the exception of Malaysia, were governed by oppressive regimes.

Since then, the group has expanded to include Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Of them, only Cambodia has embraced democracy and pledged to up hold political and civil liberties. Brunei has an absolute monarchy, Burma is ruled by an oppressive military regime and Laos and Vietnam are governed by communist parties, which tolerate little dissent.

The list of human rights violations is a lengthy one across the region, including suppression of a free press, religious freedom, the right to assembly and where critics of governments are jailed. Human rights groups have also expressed concern at the way most governments deny basic rights to ethnic minority communities, even to the point of depriving them food and medicine, as in Burma.

The host of this month’s summit, in fact, illustrates the human rights problems, say activists. In 2006, the Philippines was reported to have had the worst year of human rights violations since the dictator Ferdinand Marcos was toppled in the mid-1980s, according to rights groups, pointing to the killings of 180 people. The victims included journalists, left-wing politicians, trade unionists, lawyers and human rights workers.

Talk of an ASEAN regional mechanism for human rights first emerged in 1993, shortly after the Cold War ended. But advocates among civil society groups and academics supporting the plan have been up against governments hostile to the idea.

‘’ASEAN has outlived its original usefulness because there is no ideological threat today,’’ says Roque, the Philippines academic. ‘’Building a strong human rights agenda in the region is a way to become relevant again.’’