Human rights activists in a workshop at the ASEAN Civil Society Conference (ACSC) discussed ways on how to hold Southeast Asian governments accountable for human rights violations. Military atrocities in Burma and ethnic violence in Indonesia are some of the cases that have regional impact and call for a regional solution.

“The ASEAN leaders are allergic to [the term] 'human rights'” said Debbie Stothard of Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma. She noted with humour that ASEAN's leaders prefer the term “human dignity.” However, she said ASEAN should be made to answer as an organisation for violations happening in the member countries, specifically in a very public way such as through media.

Joao Pereira from East Timor spoke about the need to make Indonesia accountable for past violations, especially before East Timor gained independence. He notes with irony that their quest for justice also needs to be balanced with development goals, because East Timor is still economically dependent on Indonesia. He mentioned that East Timor is currently on observer status in the ASEAN, but that if it seeks to become a member of the ASEAN, the entire ASEAN should have political will to put remedies on such violations and not just try to resolve it between countries.

Max de Mesa of the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates (PAHRA) mentioned the extra-judicial killings being perpetrated by the Philippine military, and proposed a four-part action for counteracting human rights violations:

• educating vulnerable groups on human rights
• providing them with paralegal identification cards
• organising human rights defenders among villages and communities to document and monitor violations
• promoting solidarity actions among community, national, regional level.

Rebecca Lozada of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court urged the ACSC participants for wider support for the International Criminal Court (ICC) among countries in the region. She said that the ICC is already an international human rights mechanism that has successfully tried the perpetrators of war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Among the ASEAN countries, only Cambodia has ratified the Rome Statute. Thailand and the Philippines are signatories but have yet to ratify the treaty within their country jurisdiction. At the same time, countries in the region are beginning to sign impunity treaties with the US, which is not a signatory to the ICC. At the same time, the US is also applying pressure on some ASEAN countries not to sign on to the ICC treaty.

ASEAN is made up of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Burma, Brunei Darussalam.

Listen to the sound files of their presentations at the ACSC on the Isis website at http://www.isiswomen.org/announced/aseanpodcast.html.