Young Southeast Asians Are Slowly Nudging ASEAN Toward Change

Max Han vividly remembers the haze that would roll over his hometown of Kuala Lumpur several times a year when farmers across the Strait of Malacca set fire to large swaths of jungle to make way for palm oil plantations. Schools would close for weeks at a time, depriving Han and thousands of other children of their U.N.-endorsed rights to an education and to a clean and healthy environment.

Each year, across Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, millions suffer from the environmental, economic, and health damage caused by the transboundary haze. In 1999, ASEAN’s environment ministers adopted a policy to promote zero burning, yet the bloc’s policy of non-intervention means that enforcing this policy has been virtually impossible.

Still, Han believes that ASEAN can protect the environmental and human rights of its constituents, and he’s fighting for it as one of the three young activists involved in the drafting process of the ASEAN Declaration on Environmental Rights. The framework is designed to uphold the principles and provisions that address the present environmental and human rights challenges in ASEAN, as well as ensure the necessary protection and support for vulnerable groups impacted by them. The working group that put together the Declaration was the first of its kind to invite several representatives of civil society and think tanks, including young environmental activists, to the drafting table.

“This was a learning opportunity for both ends: both for ASEAN to engage civil society, and for civil society to learn how to engage and be more conscious of the ASEAN way and adapt advocacy to the constraints and operational conditions of policymaking,” says Han, who participated in the drafting process in his capacity as the secretary of the ASEAN Youth Forum.

Han hopes that the Declaration, which is being reviewed by ASEAN’s Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) before it can be passed on to ASEAN member states for further deliberations, will institutionalize the notion that a clean environment is a human right. However, ASEAN’s failed record of protecting human rights and preventing environmental degradation has raised skepticism that this framework will instigate any substantial change.

AICHR has been around for 15 years, with little to show for it. In 2012, the body drafted the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, which was adopted the same year and is considered by many scholars and advocates to fall short of basic international standards of human rights, compromised by the inclusion of ASEAN’s principles of sovereignty and non-interference. The AICHR did not condemn the 2014 coup in Thailand, failed to raise questions about the mass expulsion of Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine State in Myanmar, and virtually ignored Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs.”

“AICHR is probably in a worse position now than even in the past, as the whole region has generally undergone a democratic backsliding in recent years, even in some of the freer states like Indonesia and Thailand, let alone places like Cambodia and Vietnam that have become more authoritarian,” says Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for Southeast and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The United Nations calls advocates like Han who are linking human and environmental rights “environmental human rights defenders” (EHRDs) and has recognized the threats that they face from private corporations and governments who oppose their work. The organization Global Witness documented around 352 killings of EHRDs in ASEAN between 2012 and 2023, a number that makes up almost 17 percent of the global total. The Philippines leads these numbers: in 2023, of the 196 defenders reportedly killed or disappeared across the globe, 17 were in the Philippines.

“Defending the environment is a very dangerous activity in Southeast Asia,” Lia Mai Torres, the head of the secretariat at the Manila-based Asia Pacific Network of Environmental Defenders (APNED), told Radio Free Asia earlier this year. “We have enforced disappearances. We have bombings in our communities and militarization. We have killings of farmers and indigenous people just for working on their land.”

In the Philippines, where Torres is based, environmental activists are frequently “red-tagged” and accused of being supporters or members of the country’s long-running communist insurgency. Doing so strips EHRDs of the protections of the law, allowing police and military personnel to detain them without a warrant or formal changes. Earlier this fall, environmental activist Rowena Dasig went missing for two months while conducting research on the impacts of a proposed gas turbine power project on a fishing community in Quezon province.

Despite calls from the U.N. Human Rights Council to stop the practice of red-tagging, Philippine authorities continue to provide support and approval for the process. As of today, the AICHR has not issued any statements on the matter.

Red-tagging has also been used to strip indigenous communities in the Philippines of their right to “free, prior, and informed consent” prior to the extraction of resources from their land, an international legal principle that was incorporated into the Philippine Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997.

The concept of indigeneity in Southeast Asia has long been contested by ASEAN members on the supposed basis that all Southeast Asians are equally indigenous. Its usage is also controversial because of the term’s colonialist roots. While there is no consensus surrounding exactly who is included in Southeast Asia’s indigenous population, it is estimated that the region is home to between 90 and 125 million indigenous people. Research indicates that the economic integration paramount to ASEAN’s mandate disproportionately infringes on the right of indigenous communities to provide consent for projects carried out on their land. Ancestral lands are often the target of resource extraction and development projects by multinational companies, and indigenous communities are often displaced in the process.

Protecting the right of indigenous peoples to provide consent is key to the ASEAN Declaration on Environmental Rights that Max Han helped draft. However, the inclusion of the term “indigenous” was a sticking point during the drafting process. The latest publicly available text refers to indigenous people as “ethnic communities,” undermining the rights that they are privy to under the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It also excludes the term “environmental human rights defenders,” which similarly negates environmental activists the protections outlined by the U.N.

Throughout the drafting process, the ASEAN Declaration on Environmental Rights was reduced from a 17-page legally binding framework to the seven-page non-binding declaration that was passed on to AICHR. In an op-ed published by The Diplomat earlier this year, Prarthana Rao and Ian Salvana of FORUM-Asia said that the most recent draft is “poised to become another nonbinding instrument, used as mere lip service to project ‘progress’ on environmental rights.”

The way the agreement was stripped of some of its most important and controversial language highlights the challenging reality of working within an organization like ASEAN, which makes decisions based on consensus and must adhere to a policy of non-interference in member states’ affairs. Meanwhile, issues like the rising tensions in South China Sea and Myanmar’s ongoing civil war have dominated discussions at forums like the recent ASEAN Summit in Vientiane, putting environmental rights challenges within the bloc on the back burner.

“There just really isn’t room in ASEAN right now for much focus on human rights, and even longtime regional champions of it at the leadership level, like Anwar Ibrahim, have become less vocal on rights issues,” says CFR’s Kurlantzick.

A coalition of civil society organizations, including Max Han’s ASEAN Youth Forum and Lia Torres’ APNED, have developed and championed the “ASEAN People’s Declaration on Environmental Rights,” asking for improved transparency in the Declaration’s review process. The CSOs have called upon AICHR to amend the framework so that it recognizes EHRDs and indigenous people, outlines an explicit right to justice and legal redress, and enhances environmental impact assessment standards to ensure transparency and public participation.

“The reason why we are pushing so hard for this document, even if it is not legally binding, is because we hope to have a frame of reference,” says Han. “The fact that there is a document on a regional level sets the precedent for discussion. Not just within ASEAN, but internationally as well.”

The AICHR has not yet issued a response to the People’s Declaration or a ruling on the ASEAN Declaration on Environmental Rights, though a recent Instagram post about the framework from AICHR’s Malaysia representative excited Han and other members of the drafting team. It’s small wins like these that are keeping him and other young activists hopeful as they navigate the bureaucracy of an organization that has struggled to protect human and environmental rights within its member states.

“We can’t solely place faith in institutions. Instead, a lot of faith and strength lies in the people of ASEAN and the civil society groups that are tirelessly driving demands for reforms,” says Han. “This is really an opportunity for ASEAN to show the world that, as a huge emerging economy, that we can take the lead and lead the conversation about environmental and human rights. I see this as an opportunity to lead, and hope that ASEAN governments can see it in this way as well.

“We’re all just trying to make ASEAN a better place. That’s our common north star.”