Tae-Ung Baik, Emerging Human Rights Systems in Asia

Abstract

Tae-Ung Baik has written a masterful monograph on the emergent human rights systems in Asia. It is a very welcome addition to the existing scholarship on human rights in Asia which has largely tended to focus on philosophical and political science expositions thus far. One has only to refer to the plethora of writings surrounding the Asian values debate and the universalism-particularism tensions in the 1990s—resulting in the comparative lack of scholarship using the cross-disciplinary approaches of international relations (IR) and international law—to recognise this. Given that human rights institutionalisation in Asia has been strengthening, if slowly, in the past two decades, the scholarship on human rights in Asia has also progressed in the corresponding substantive areas of norms, law, institutions, implementation, and efficacy at the triple levels of the domestic, regional and international arenas. These are the issues pertinent to the contemporary study of human rights in Asia which...