ASEAN urged to form human rights court
A coalition of 70 Asian NGOs called on ASEAN countries Tuesday to create a regional human rights court, amid criticism over the grouping’s failure to form a powerful rights commission and to push Myanmar to free Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Solidarity for Asian People’s Advocacy Task Force on ASEAN and Human Rights (SAPA-TFAHR) said it had sent an open letter to the high-level panel tasked with drafting the political declaration to the terms of reference (TOR) of the ASEAN Inter-Governmental Commission for Human Rights.
ASEAN recently approved the terms of reference establishing the first-ever human rights commission in the region, which has been widely criticized as powerless and even accused of being no more than “window dressing” for the organization once dubbed an exclusive club of dictators.
Indonesia, one of the only two full-fledged democracies in the region, secured commitments from other countries to sign a political declaration in return for its endorsement of the terms of reference it had earlier strongly opposed.
The declaration will provide a mandate that the rights commission, slated to be officially established in October, will be reviewed every five years.
The ASEAN panel will convene in Jakarta from Aug. 26 to 27.
In their letter, the NGOs said they demanded the regional grouping establish within 10 years a full-fledged regional human rights mechanism, whose standards they said had to be on a par with those of the mechanisms in other regions such as Africa and Europe, which already had rights courts.
“The evolution to develop protection mandates and a full-fledged human rights mechanism may take 100 years, or 10 years, or less,” Indonesia’s Rafendi Djamin, who co-signed the open letter to the ASEAN panel, said at a press conference in Jakarta. continue
ASEAN urged to form human rights court
