The human rights protection system in Southeast Asia and ASEAN: towards a regional human rights court

Abstract

The idea of this thesis started from the fact that human rights violations, such as the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and the alleged massive extrajudicial killings of drug dealers in the Philippines since June 2016 in Rodrigo Duterte’s regime, have been occurring in the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for a decade. But, the existing human rights instruments could not provide proper remedies against such abuses. The existing regional human rights institution—the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) is not independent from member states’ powers and does not have protective mandates to deal with human rights violations. It is not even competent to receive complaints. Also, the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD) does not include provisions on how human rights can be protected with a legally binding effect when they are violated, and how victims can be compensated after having suffered from human rights abuses. This led to the main focus of this research which aims to point out that ASEAN must develop its regional human rights protection system, have a legally binding convention, and in particular establish a regional human rights court.