Why Create a Regional Human Rights Regime? The ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission for Human Rights

On 18 November 2012, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) took the historical step of issuing an ASEAN Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration is only the last of a number of steps expressing ASEAN’s commitment to human rights. This commitment first became visible in the ASEAN Charter of 2007 and promised that the regional grouping would establish its own human rights mechanism. The mechanism was eventually set up in October 2009 as the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR). The development towards greater commitment has surprised many observers, as ASEAN and individual members were quite active in the so-called Asian values debate in the early 1990s, in which they promoted a relativist position on human rights, emphasizing economic development to the detriment of civil and political rights (Emmerson 1995; Kausikan 1994). Moreover, ASEAN’s earlier constitutional documents never mentioned human rights or democracy. The new policy also appears to weaken the support for constructivist explanations of ASEAN as a regional organization, which have emphasized deeply embedded norms of non-interference, state sovereignty, and non-intervention into domestic affairs (Narine 2002, 2012). The policy does not fit with the organization’s earlier record on human rights and its principled stance towards non-interference in domestic affairs.