Are Refugees Making ASEAN Rethink Human Rights?

Friday, January 27, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
(Pacific)
Speaker: 
  • Anja Jetschke

Long a laggard on human rights, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is being pressed from within to reconsider its indifference. In 2009 an ASEAN Human Rights Commission (AICHR) was created and tasked with promoting (not protecting) human rights in Southeast Asia. In 2012 its members agreed to issue a first-ever ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. Most observers dismissed these moves as symbolic—an effort mainly to assuage foreign critics and  gain international legitimacy. Prof. Jetschke differs.  She will argue that the AICHR’s formation was prompted in part by the swelling flows of refugees across borders inside Southeast Asia, especially from Myanmar, and the problems thereby created for the region’s states and societies. She will also explore the extent to which these factors have eroded one of ASEAN’s strongest regional norms—the taboo on interfering in members’ domestic affairs. That erosion could strengthen ASEAN as something more than the sum of its sovereign members.

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Anja Jetschke is Professor of International Relations at the University of Göttingen’s political science department since 2012. Her Comparative Regional Organizations Project has developed the world’s largest database on regional organizations. Previously she headed a research program on international governance at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (Hamburg) and was an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg. She also held research fellowships at Ohio State University and the University of Berlin. Her publications include many articles and chapters on comparative regionalism, ASEAN, and the AICHR, and a prize-winning book, Human Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines (2011). Her doctorate is from the European University (Florence).