Adistra Kusuma Waligalit
Faculty of Law, Universitas Gadjah Mada
adisstrakw@gmail.com
Abstract
Regional human rights mechanism is one of the pillars of human rights protection. Currently, there are five existing regional mechanism for human rights: the European, Inter-American, African, Arab, and ASEAN. The current mechanism in ASEAN is still in developing stage, meaning that it still have not established a properly supported system. An ideal condition for any regional human rights mechanism would be to establish a binding treaty and human rights court to adjudicate any violations. For now, only European, Inter-American, and African system that possess such mechanism. Although there are many criticisms and difficulties in the current ASEAN mechanism, it has shown glimpse of potential on how important this mechanism would be in the future. The effort of ASEAN in the last decade, however, has shown significant changes in the protection of human rights, particularly the adoption of ASEAN Human Rights Declaration in 2012.
Seeing that in the past decade there has been significant changes on ASEAN’s effort to develop human rights protection, it would be important to further analyse the prospect of this mechanism development with the hope that it could aspire to reach the ultimate goal of establishing human rights court for ASEAN. As well as addressing the problematic notion of ASEAN’s unique stance towards human rights concept which is different from the more generally accepted ‘western’ concept. The study mainly uses a normative legal research to gather a conclusive recommendation for possible schemes to achieve a proper regional human rights mechanism in ASEAN.
Keywords: Regional human rights mechanism, ASEAN