Foreign Ministers from ten countries of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN) will meet in New York on September 27 to review the ASEAN
Human Rights Declaration (AHRD), which is currently the controversial second
draft.
On September 25, the Asian Forum
for Human Rights and Development (Forum Asia) and Solidarity for Asian People's
Advocacy Task Force on ASEAN and Human Rights delivered a statement before the
Human Rights Council in Geneva, which called the draft version of the ASEAN
Declaration seriously flawed for being discriminatory and in violation of the
commonly held principle of human rights being inalienable.
Throughout the drafting of the
Declaration, the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) has
been sharply criticized for several reasons: limiting civil society
participation by rushing the drafting process, curbing the diversity of civil
society voices by excluding many groups denied official registration and legal
recognition by their governments for work as human rights defenders, lacking
transparency by not sharing drafts of the Declaration with civil society groups
or indicating if civil society recommendations were being incorporated into the
drafts, and excluding marginalized groups requiring human rights protections,
including LGBT people.
AICHR which comprises
representatives from each of the ten ASEAN countries was mandated in 2008 under
the ASEAN Human Rights Charter to develop a "framework for human rights
cooperation through various ASEAN conventions and other instruments dealing
with human rights." Among AICHR's members, tasked with giving the region
its first set of guidelines for ensuring human rights, are high level
government officials including Vietnam's director of foreign affairs, Brunei's
chief justice of the sharia high court, the Philippines ambassador to Japan,
Singapore's senior district judge for subordinate courts, as well as two
activists from Thailand and Indonesia, and a lawyer from the Malaysia Human
Rights Commission.
The ASEAN Intergovernmental
Commission on Human Rights makes decisions by consensus, which has created
stalemates on decisions about excluding "public morality" as a caveat
for suspending human rights and including LGBT people's rights. According to
the summary record of the Commission's convening in the Philippines on
September 12, Sriprapha Petcharamesree, Thailand's representative gave
assurances that if consensus was not possible, they would use the formulation
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). " We will not go lower
than the Universal Declaration," she said. In contrast, Bounkeut
Sangsomsak, the representative from Lao, insisted that they "should not
simply be a copy the Universal Declaration but take into consideration the
diversity and realities of the ten ASEAN member countries."
LGBT rights advocates in the
region , working to make the Declaration truly "people-centric" are
concerned that in the absence of explicit reference to sexual orientation and
gender identity (SOGI) in the Universal Declaration, the drafters of the ASEAN
Declaration will omit LGBT rights. The activists are urging that the AHRD also
be based on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC),
which include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories.
All ASEAN countries, have signed these two treaties and are obligated to
promote the principles of equality they mandate.
The drafters of the AICHR are out
of step with developments in the broader human rights arena. They have missed
the opportunity to adopt a progressive vision of human rights. Instead, they
have blamed religion and culture for holding back its commitment to recognizing
that all human beings have human rights and that LGBT rights are human rights.
The decision to omit sexual
orientation and gender identity from the ASEAN Declaration signals lack of
concern for marginalized communities who suffer horrendous violence because of
their sexual orientation and gender identity and have no avenues of legal
recourse for widespread and institutionalized discrimination. Those individuals
from religious minority groups that have noisily demonized LGBT people and
spread intolerance in the name of religion do not represent the majority in their
countries, nor do they represent the majority point of view of all religions.
Most people in the ASEAN countries do not want LGBT people to suffer from
violence, discrimination, hatred and intolerance.
The meeting of the ASEAN
Ministers precedes a convening of Commonwealth Foreign Ministers on September
29 in New York. Four ASEAN countries are part of the Commonwealth (formerly
colonized by Britain) -- Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore, the strongest
opponents to including sexual orientation and gender identity in the ASEAN
Declaration. Burma, also a Commonwealth nation is silent on the rights of
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.
There is still time to right a
wrong. And now is the time to do it. Non-discrimination, non-violence, and equal
protection of the law are critical for the well being of all people in Asia
including LGBT people. The Foreign Ministers of the ASEAN need to reject the
current draft of the Declaration and insist that it be inclusive and truly
representative of the diversity of ASEAN societies. It needs to reflect the
voices of hundreds of civil society groups who have asked for the inclusion of
sexual orientation and gender identity as a protected category in the ASEAN
Human Rights Declaration before it is adopted in November 2012.
Grace Poore
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