The Role of Law and the Rule of Law in ASEAN Integration: Can ASEAN Take Human Rights Seriously?

The adoption of the ASEAN Charter in 2007 represented a watershed moment in the organisation's history – for the first time the member states explicitly included principles of human rights and democracy in a binding regional agreement. Since then, developments in the region have included the creation of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights in 2009 and the adoption of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration in 2012. Despite these advances, many commentators ask whether ASEAN can take human rights seriously. The authors explore this question by comprehensively examining the new ASEAN human rights mechanisms in the context of existing national and international human rights institutions. This book places these regional mechanisms and commitments to human rights within the framework of the political and legal development of ASEAN and its member states and considers the way in which ASEAN could strengthen its new institutions to better promote and protect human rights.

• Provides a comparative study of the multifaceted ASEAN human rights system in relation to the other human rights mechanisms available to ASEAN member states at the national, regional and international levels.
• Explores the historical issues and political developments that could explain the evolutionary path of the ASEAN human rights system and looks at the developments that have led to legal change
• Examines the structure and work of the ASEAN human rights mechanisms in detail and updates the current literature on ASEAN and human rights