Abuse of Human Rights in Myanmar: An Urgent Appeal to Reinterpret the ASEAN Non-Interference Principle

Abstract

Myanmar highlights the international community's worry over ASEAN's failure to protect the human rights of the country's citizens. Numerous stakeholders, including scholars and observers, consider the non-interference principle as the bedrock for interstate relations in the region to be the greatest barrier to ASEAN's intervention in Myanmar. Using the method of doctrinal research, this article investigates the junction of the concept of non-interference as the spirit of state sovereignty and the principle of human rights in the context of Myanmar. This article claims that the reason why human rights cannot be enforced in ASEAN, as in the case of Myanmar, is because ASEAN adheres to the principle of non-interference in the traditional expression of state sovereignty, thereby making the state the dominant actor and denying the existence of people. This article proposes that ASEAN shift its understanding of state sovereignty from the traditional to the human rights perspective, which has become a universal view that places humans as the ultimate sovereigns of a country.