This week the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) did not pass a resolution pressurising Azerbaijan to release or retry its political prisoners. Rebecca Vincent looks at how the body’s lack of pressure further endangers free expression in the country
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On Sunday, the world prepared for President Obama’s first-time visit to the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). But underneath the press torrent was a lesser-known event: the leaders of the 10 member states of the regional bloc signed the much-lamented ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD). Freedom of expression, internet privacy, and minority rights are all potential casualties of this document, which amounts to an assortment of titular but pleasant-sounding logorrhea — designed largely by dictators in a region where free expression is, in most countries, on the decline.
The first conundrum? In declaring its broader principles, the charter annuls itself when it states that human rights should be respected everywhere, except that they shouldn’t:
All human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. All human rights and fundamental freedoms in this Declaration must be treated in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing and with the same emphasis. At the same time, the realisation of human rights must be considered in the regional and national context bearing in mind different political, economic, legal, social, cultural, historical and religious backgrounds.
That’s a huge exception that governments can play with. The US State Department called out concerns of ASEAN’s cultural relativist approach to human rights, a term that labels individual liberties as culturally alien to Asians. It’s a common justification used to curtail expression, made famous when former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore argued at the end of the Cold War that liberal democracy was a Western value that should not be brought to certain countries.
The declaration also employs the obfuscating language of “national security,” “public order” and “public morality” as prerequisites to exercising basic freedoms. Narrowing that framework down to free speech, the declaration reads, for instance: “Every person has the right to be free from … attacks upon that person’s honour and reputation.” Though not legally binding, those phrases lend legitimacy to the wording that Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand typically use when jailing critics.
Mam Sonando, director of Cambodia’s independent Beehive Radio station, who was jailed for 20 years in October
“They can say that we banned such-and-such speech because it goes against our national context, or contravenes a vaguely defined notion such as ‘public morality’ or the ‘general welfare of the peoples in a democratic society’,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch, “or because those making the speech have their rights balanced by duties to the state to not do such a thing.”
In a region where online surveillance is, in most member states, on the rise, internet privacy gets no mention. The Cambodian Center for Human Rights also pointed out that indigenous and LGBT groups appear to have been left out of specific protections from discrimination and the principle of equality. In Southeast Asia, minorities such as the Rohingya, Wa and Shan in Myanmar, the Papuans in Indonesia, and the potpourri of highland groups often called “Montagnards” in Vietnam have all been persecuted in military and police campaigns, and denied cultural rights.
The triumph of local laws over international concepts of rights should not be surprising from a bloc that is sclerotic and, in the past, has been characterised as a “club of dictators.” ASEAN’s background shows why it straddles this non-interference line on its sovereigns: The organisation was born in 1967 out of the devastation of the Vietnam War, when five countries in Southeast Asia were hoping to tether in an anti-communist grouping that could stand on its own against the involvement of the US, the Soviet Union and China.
But its espousal of “territorial integrity” — of respecting a government’s right to rule without the Cold War-style interference from external powers — quickly became an excuse to back dictators in alliances of convenience. In the late 1970s, ASEAN supported the murderous Khmer Rouge forces at the Thai-Cambodia border, which had already overseen the deaths of 1.7 million people in Cambodia. They hoped the rag-tag army could be a buffer to prevent the powerful Vietnamese military from marching across Thailand — a fear that, in hindsight, was probably not justified, even though Vietnam had invaded Cambodia in 1978.
After the Cold War ended, the group switched its focus from security to trade and expanded its membership to include Cambodia, Burma, Brunei, and nominally communist Vietnam and Laos. But political openness has not accompanied economic growth in Southeast Asia. Rather, the group’s foundational peg of “non-interference” remains unchanged despite signing the 2008 ASEAN Charter, and its delegates continue to defer to national governments on questions of free expression.
With that said, does the human rights declaration even matter on free speech issues? Probably not, given the bloc’s chimera of consensus that, put bluntly, is indifference.
Free speech will come from inside the ASEAN member states themselves, rather than from the bureaucrats who exchange flowers, link their hands together in photo ops and call each other “Your Excellency” at summits.
Geoffrey Cain is an editor at New Mandala, the Southeast Asia blog at the Australian National University
Iranian blogger Sattar Beheshti was allegedly tortured to death in a prison in Tehran on Thursday (8 November). Beheshti, 35 was arrested on 28 October by Iranian police on charges of “actions against national security on social networks and Facebook.” The human rights defender had received death threats as a result of his anti-government blog and had reportedly filed a complaint about torture during his time in the detention facility. His family say they were told by police to pick up his body on Wednesday and have been prevented from visiting his grave, with the exception of his brother-in-law. France and Britain have called on Tehran to investigate.
Andrei Sannikov, a former political prisoner from Belarus, has been granted asylum in the UK. Sannikov told the Charter97 website:
It was not a simple decision for me. But I had no other choice — other options were to be tortured and humiliated in jail or to be quiet as a lamb. I remain a Belarusian politician and will go on telling the truth about my country and press for concrete measures of help to democratic Belarus. I think my decision will help to free my wife and son, who are still kept hostages by Lukashenko’s regime.
Andrei Sannikov after being beaten by police on election night in December 2010
Sannikov and six other opposition candidates were arrested after presidential elections held on 19 December 2010. Five of them were jailed. Sannikov was severely beaten by the police on election night while protesting the result in Minsk. The brutal breakup of a peaceful protest against election fraud marked the start of a mass crackdown on opposition.
He was later sentenced to five years imprisonment after being convicted of organising mass riots, his wife was also arrested.
While Sannikov and his wife Irina Khalip were both being held in KGB jails, the authorities tried to permanently remove their son Danil, then three, from their care and send him to an orphans’ asylum.
Sannikov and his aide Dzmitry Bandarenka were released on 14 April 2012 after months of international campaigning by civil society inside the country and abroad, including Index.
Sannikov’s wife Irina Khalip, a well-known journalist,remains in Minsk under house arrest serving a two-year suspended prison sentence despite a promise to lift her travel restrictions made by president Alexander Lukashenko during a recent interview with Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Independent newspaper.
Mike Harris, Head of Advocacy at Index on Censorship said:
In the run-up to the 2010 presidential election, I interviewed Andrei in his office in Minsk. He was under huge pressure even before his arrest. Sannikov’s detention and subsequent torture show that President Lukashenko is committed to crushing any political dissent. Sannikov is still barred from standing in any future election, forcing his hand to seek asylum. The EU must call for the unconditional release of all the political prisoners before any engagement or IMF bailout of Belarus’s ailing economy.
Lukashenko came to power in 1994, and has an iron-grip on Belarus prohibiting protest and limiting civil freedoms. Human rights defenders say there are still 12 political prisoners jailed in Belarus.
Andrei Aliaksandrau is Belarus and OSCE Programme Officer at Index. He tweets at @aliaksandrau