Monday, 19 November 2012
Disregarding the deep concerns expressed by senior United Nations officials, human rights experts and hundreds of civil society and grassroots organisations at the national, regional and international levels, ASEAN leaders nonetheless adopted yesterday an “ASEAN Human Rights Declaration” that undermines, rather than affirms, international human rights law and standards. The document is a declaration of government powers disguised as a declaration of human rights.
It is deplorable that the governments of ASEAN have insisted on making a Declaration that implies that their people are less deserving of human rights than the people of Europe, Africa or the Americas. The people of ASEAN should never accept a lower level of protection of their human rights than the rest of the world.
The ASEAN Human Rights Declaration should have reflected the universally held conviction that respecting human rights necessarily means imposing limitations on the powers of government. Instead, the Declaration that was adopted, through some of its deeply flawed “General Principles”, will serve to provide ready-made justifications for human rights violations of people within the jurisdiction of ASEAN governments. These include balancing the enjoyment of fundamental rights with government-imposed duties on individuals, subjecting the realisation of human rights to regional and national contexts, and broad and all-encompassing limitations on rights in the Declaration, including rights that should never be restricted. In many of its articles, the enjoyment of rights is made subject to national laws, instead of requiring that the laws be consistent with the rights.
The Declaration fails to include several key basic rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to freedom of association and the right to be free from enforced disappearance.
Read more: http://www.forum-asia.org/?p=15609
