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Human rights can be a marginal matter in Southeast Asia. Conservatives say human rights are not needed—things are fine the way they are. Being a foreign import, they also claim, human rights have no root in the region’s history and have little bearing on reality on the ground. This ostensibly foreign origin is likewise a point that nationalists of Southeast Asia count against human rights. Far too often, they argue, human rights serve as a leverage to advance outsiders’ interests rather than those of fellow compatriots. Meanwhile, liberals remain a small, if sometimes influential, portion of the population.
From classic components that include international humanitarian law and the right to self-determination, the sprawling array of human rights that the United Nations monitors around the world has expanded to include transitional justice and the right to adequate housing and social security. Yet, from the point of view of the average Southeast Asian, these rights can appear distant and irrelevant to daily life struggles. As a result of little popular pressure to move forward on human rights, democratic governments around Southeast Asia face no longstanding incentive to prioritize human rights.
Precisely this dynamic unfolded in Malaysia in recent weeks as the government considered joining the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). This week’s Spotlight article by Sin Chew Daily leader writer Chong Lip Teck explores the political context and potential fallout from the Malaysian government’s attempt to raise the question of what to do with the country’s racially discriminatory system. Faced with demonstrations of mostly conservative Malays who benefit from the currentBumiputera-first system, the Malaysian government eventually chose what must be over what should be.
The link between human rights and democracy is similarly tenuous in the Philippines. The Duterte administration has decided it must prioritize a ‘war against drugs’ that has killed thousands of poor Filipinos and clear away anything, or anyone, that might get in its way. As Human Rights Watch researcher Carlos Conde notes in our second Spotlight article, many Filipinos, especially journalists, are perceived to be hindering the government’s ‘drug war’ and are getting brutalized in consequence. As press freedom, a pillar of human rights, continues to deteriorate in the Philippines, democracy, too, will gradually lose its meaning.
Democracies enjoy a presumption of being defenders of human rights, but this is yet to be the case in Southeast Asia. All democracies of the region have notable, unresolved human-rights cases, whether repression in Papua, racial discrimination in Malaysia, restrictions on speech in Singapore, or threats to press freedom in the Philippines. While democratic governments realize the importance of human rights, both in itself and for public relations purposes, human rights will continue to lose out to more immediate political imperatives without sustained demand for them from the people. This Human Rights Day, let’s call on our democracies to respect our rights.
