9.5 Asian and South Asian Initiatives

Asia's absence (the honest opening): Asia has no comprehensive regional human-rights system — the world's largest region without a human-rights court or charter. The reasons (the exam's list): the diversity (religions, systems, development levels); the sovereignty sensitivities (the ASEAN Way's non-interference); the Cold War's divisions; the "Asian values" debate (the universalism-vs-cultural-relativism quarrel — Unit 5's theories' regional face). The initiatives that exist: the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR, 2009) and the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (2012) — the soft, state-led design (the civil-society critique: the non-interference's caveats, the no-independent-commission weakness); the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions (APF) — the NHRCs' network as the regional substitute; the OHCHR's regional offices; the stalled charter proposals (the Asian Human Rights Charter — the civil-society document). The South Asian record: SAARC's social faces — the conventions (the trafficking of women and children; the child welfare; the terrorism cooperation's rights edges) and the SAARC Social Charter; SAARC's human-rights silence — no SAARC human-rights body (the Article X politics — Unit 4's structural limit). The substitutes: the national human-rights commissions' cooperation (the NHRC-Nepal's networks; the regional NHRIs' forum; the cross- border issues: trafficking, migration, refugees); the civil-society bodies; the courts' dialogues (the South Asian judges' conferences; the constitutional cross-pollination — the PIL's shared technique; the Nepali-Indian-Bangladeshi lines of mutual citation). Exam…