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An opinion piece on ASEAN's responsibilities towards refugees in the region, on the occasion of the 26th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 26-27 April 2015. This piece was published in The Malaysian Insider on 25 April 2015.
Technium Social Sciences Journal, 2021
This paper identifies and analyzes the efforts of ASEAN member states in addressing the contemporary threats and hardships experienced by refugees. The situation is further exacerbated by the pandemic brought about by the COVID-19 coronavirus. As an international organization, ASEAN is expected to have a collective and cooperative strategy to address this. However, ASEAN member states do not exhibit large-scale collaborative efforts to resolve the plight of the refugees. Rather, mutual agreements seem to be limited to the host/transit country and the native country of the refugees. Liberal institutionalist theory that emphasizes the function of international institutions to aid multinationals cooperation in certain areas is used to explain ASEAN’s role to deal with the plight of refugees in South East Asia. It is recommended for ASEAN members to re-examine the potential of international relations in securing a safer and sustainable future for refugees.
Forced Migration Review, Issue on ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’, 2017
The Rohingya refugee crisis has become a regional crisis. Members of the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) must enhance regional cooperation in order to improve protection for the region’s refugees.
CEJISS, 2018
Most of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries perceive themselves as non-immigrant nations. It means that most ASEAN countries are not the destination for immigrants to settle. This approach also appears when they responded to the massive influx of the refugee in the Southeast Asia region. In absence of ASE-AN regional mechanism on refugee protection (which means covered all stage of treatment for refugee), a few ASEAN member countries-Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia- have the valuable efforts and experiences in term of refugee handling and reception, based on their domestic law and national policy, for instance in Indo-Chinese refugees' crisis in late 1980s until 1990s, and also Rohingya "boat people" crisis in 2015. This article discusses the legal efforts undertaken by the three ASEAN countries to reconcile their sovereignty in protecting refugees who enter their territories through law and policy. In addition, this article also elaborates on the extent to which laws and policies contribute to refugee protection in Southeast Asia.
Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law, 2018
This article will argue that there are three related issues of concern regarding the Rohingya crisis: (1) a singular focus on persecution and nationality in Myanmar; (2) statelessness and displacement in the region; and (3) grave human rights violations amounting to international crimes including genocide and crimes against humanity. This article will discuss active steps that ASEAN should take. To ensure that Myanmar will willingly accept the responsibility to address the source of the problem, the international community, particularly ASEAN, has to stand firm against Myanmar’s gross violation of human rights. At the same time, ASEAN must deal with the refugee crisis by formulating a workable regional framework. This article will deal with the underlying conflict paradigm in all refugee issues: how to reconcile state sovereignty vis-á-vis responsibility and how to ensure protection of both human rights and state security.
Abstract In May 2015, boat loads of refugees, who were either running away from poverty or political persecution, were left stranded off the seas in their rickety boats near the shores of Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. The captain of these boats had fled amidst the scenes of panic and the clampdown by the naval presence of these countries. Given the sheer humanitarian crisis that it has since sparked, no state was willing to give these ‘boat people’ any form of safe refuge or even extending a helping hand. Not least until it caught the attention of the international community, who were incensed by the apparent lack of political will amongst Southeast Asian countries to aid these marooned refugees. Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia finally obliged to provide temporary shelter and aid to them until a more amicable solution is found. Member states within ASEAN began to shift the blame to Myanmar, where, apparently, a substantial number of these refugees had come from. Myanmar, on the other hand, has argued that there are also those who are economic refugees from poverty-stricken Bangladesh and are not necessarily ‘Rohingyas’ from within Myanmar. Shortly after the media storm, Thailand also found that some of those ‘boat people’ who have managed to land, had also fallen victims to abuses by illegal smugglers and traffickers. Images of mass graves found in Malaysia and Thailand further highlighted the plight of some of these refugees, who have found their way by trespassing the porous borders of Southeast Asia. There have been a myriad of debates about where these ‘boat people’ might have come from and how countries can help alleviate the predicament of these people. However, one thing is certain, something has to be done to resolve this humanitarian crisis that will most likely dominate discussions in the agenda of future ASEAN summits. In the meantime, questions will continue to arise: Who is to be blame? Whose responsibility is it anyway? These problems are not new, but the latest humanitarian crisis, however, has put the entire issue squarely onto the shoulders of ASEAN as an effective regional organisation. Established in November 2011, the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management (AHA Centre) might finally be seeing its biggest challenge yet. The issue with the ‘boat people’ – and the ‘Rohingyas’ in Myanmar –not only posed a huge humanitarian problem to ASEAN, but also underlined the role and the ineffectiveness of ASEAN in crisis management. This paper will, therefore, aim to examine these problems that the ASEAN regional group faces. It also aims to provide possible political and security solutions that the ASEAN community can take to rectify this crisis. Keywords: ASEAN; Rohingya Muslims; Responsibility to Protect (RtoP/ R2P);
The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity
N. Kaur and M. Ahmad (eds.), Charting a Sustainable Future of ASEAN in Business and Social Sciences, 2020
Since its foundation in 1967, the member states of ASEAN have established cooperation mechanisms in a number of sectors, ranging from trade to environmental protection. ASEAN has been highly successful in achieving cooperation in trade and commercial issues. However, it has been unable to achieve similar level of cooperation in political and humanitarian issues. For instance, the ASEAN has failed to deliver a unified response against the human rights violations of Rohingya people in Myanmar. Though the declaration of 34th ASEAN Summit in 2019 calls for 'safety and security for all communities in Rakhine state' and facilitation of the 'voluntary return of displaced persons in a safe, secure and dignified manner', it failed to mention a timeline of such repatriation process. Moreover, the declaration did not criticize the actions of Myanmar's military in the Rakhine state. This study offers a critique of ASEAN's traditional approach of diplomacy known as 'ASEAN Way'. Examining a set of relevant issues, the study seeks to outline the legal, institutional and political factors which prevented a unified ASEAN response to the Rohingya crisis. Through a qualitative analysis, it concludes with an observation that the failure to develop an institutional mechanism to deal with political and human rights issues in SouthEast Asia could hinder ASEAN's objective of becoming a more integrated 'European Union'-like community.
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