Human Rights Developments

Defending Human Rights

The Role of the International Community

United Nations

The U.N. had a high profile on human rights during the year, most prominently with respect to Afghanistan, Burma, East Timor and Cambodia. In the latter two countries, prosecutions of past abuses were high on the agenda. In East Timor, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the special rapporteurs on torture; extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; and violence against women conducted inquiries into grave abuses associated with the 1999 scorched earth campaign; UNTAET was responsible for further investigations and prosecutions. In Cambodia, negotiations over an international tribunal were conducted by the U.N's Office of Legal Affairs.

The OHCHR maintained field offices in Phnom Penh and Jakarta. While staff in the former included human rights monitoring in their brief, the Jakarta office was restricted to technical advisory services. High Commissioner Mary Robinson visited China, Indonesia, East Timor, and South Korea during the year; she was scheduled to return to China in November to work on a plan to give China technical assistance to bring its laws into conformity with international standards.

At the fifty-sixth session of the Commission on Human Rights in March, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan Kamal Hossain and Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women Radhika Coomraswamy submitted their reports based on research conducted in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1999. Hossain found widespread violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by Taliban forces and commanders against ethnic Hazaras and Tajiks in central and northern Afghanistan. Eyewitness testimony included accounts of forced displacement of civilians, deliberate burning of houses and crops, summary executions of non-combatants, arbitrary detention and forced labor. In newly occupied areas of central and northern Afghanistan, the special rapporteur found that women and children were frequently separated from their families and transported by truck to other regions of the country or to Pakistan. There were also many accounts of young girls in these areas being forcibly married to Taliban commanders. Coomaraswamy's report drew attention to a rise in violence against Afghan women, including domestic violence, honor killings, and trafficking of Afghan refugee women in Pakistan.

Burma reacted in a similar fashion to the report in October of the special rapporteur on Myanmar, Rajsoomer Allah, who for the fifth consecutive year was not permitted to visit the country on which he was tasked to report.

Most of the regional reporting to the U.N. treaty bodies was fairly routine, but the highly critical conclusions by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to a report submitted by Australia helped provoke the Australian government's angry statement in September that it would not necessarily allow further visits by treaty bodies.

United States

The Clinton Administration took a selective interest in Asia. Securing normal trading relations with China was a priority; so was preventing any escalation of the conflict in Kashmir. By the end of the year, developing a dialogue with North Korea, building on Kim Dae-Jung's "sunshine policy," was also a high priority. A state visit to India drew Indo-U.S. relations closer than ever before; a state visit to Vietnam in November was expected to put relations on an important new, trade-focused footing. Indonesia was very much a center of attention, but it wasclear that neither the U.S., nor any other major international actor, knew exactly how to respond to a democratically chosen government that was so manifestly weak in terms of strategic vision and capacity to govern. The U.S. took an active role in supporting the UNTAET in East Timor and in pressing Indonesia to take action against militias in West Timor.

In general, trade and economic relations and strategic interests in the region took precedence over human rights, yet many Asian governments believed that the U.S. continued to give far too much attention to rights. Without any other international support, for example, the U.S. tried and failed to get a resolution critical of China adopted at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The U.S. was the only donor at the World Bank-chaired Consultative Group on Indonesia meeting in October that suggested loans might be conditioned on Indonesia's progress toward resolving the refugee situation in West Timor.

The U.S. government's promotion of religious freedom-largely due to congressional pressure-drew a mixed response in Asia, appreciated by victims of persecution, seen by governments as meddling. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom held hearings on abuses in China, India and Pakistan, and religious freedom was expected to be a priority of Clinton's trip to Vietnam in November. In general, the impact of U.S. appeals or interventions was marginal.

The office of the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes took a strong interest in justice issues relating to possible crimes against humanity in East Timor and Cambodia.

Japan

Japanese diplomacy was at a post-Cold War peak this year, and human rights received attention as an important, if limited, component of Japanese policy in Asia. Japan hosted the G-8 summit in Okinawa (July 21-23), and continued to emphasize building economic and political relations with its neighbors in Southeast and South Asia; the prime minister toured South Asia for the first time in a decade. A pre-summit gathering of G-8 foreign ministers issued a statement endorsing "fundamental principles of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and an open economy" as "indispensable" in an era of globalization. But at the summit itself, the G-8 leaders side-stepped some of the most controversial issues.

Promoting reform and stability in Indonesia was a top priority for Japan, which hosted the annual donor meeting for Indonesia in October. It also provided major assistance for East Timor's reconstruction and urged a resolution of the crisis in West Timor. Japan maintained good relations with Burma, trying to nudge the military towards democratization but also helped to deflect criticism of Burma internationally. Japan continued its campaign to give full economic and political support to the Hun Sen government in Cambodia, while also urging its cooperation with the U.N. on a Khmer Rouge tribunal. Relations with China, despite a visit to Tokyo by Jiang Zemin late in the year, remained rocky, largely because of mutual wariness on security issues; human rights concerns were marginal to Japan's bilateral agenda with Beijing.

European Union

The European Union was active in promoting peaceful resolution of the conflicts in Sri Lanka (backing Norway's mediation offer) and Kashmir. The first ever E.U.-India summit took place in June. Following the October 12, 1999 coup in Pakistan, the E.U. quickly distanced itself from the military government, and only restored political dialogue with Islamabad in September 2000.

Otherwise, the E.U. was concerned with expanding economic relations across the region, capped by the third Asia-Europe Meeting (ASME) summit in Seoul in October, which brought together heads of state from fifteen European countries and ten Asian governments to discuss expanded economic cooperation.

The E.U. put a high priority on finalizing a trade agreement with China in the context of the WTO negotiations, while including human rights in its political dialogues and summit meetings. But the E.U.-China human rights dialogue received increased scrutiny during the year as it failed to deliver tangible results, and by year's end was under internal review.

During the year, the E.U. used its influence as a leading donor to support human rights and democratization in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia and East Timor. In the case of Burma, however, splits within the E.U. made it difficult to develop a stronger common position towards the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) following the SPDC's September crackdown. An E.U.-ASEAN meeting in Laos remained on the calendar for December.

World Bank

Two of the World Bank's top five loan recipients this year were in Asia (India, U.S. $1.8 billion and China, $1.67 billion). The social and economic consequences of the Asian financial crisis were key factors in sparking further reforms within the World Bank. Those reforms included more engagement with civil society, strong attention to combating corruption, and an interest in examining the bank's potential role in supporting basic judicial reforms.

World Bank President James Wolfensohn's extraordinary appeal to Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid urging an end the violence in West Timor had a major impact in Jakarta and helped frame an overall international agenda for dealing with the crisis.

The bank's emphasis on participation as an element of good governance led to consultations with civil society in advance of bank-convened donor meetings, with NGOs actually participating in some of the donor conferences, for example, on Indonesia and Cambodia. But in countries where NGOs were non-existent or tightly controlled, such as China and Vietnam, the bank effectively let the governments set the terms of any "consultation" with people likely to be affected by bank projects.

In East Timor, the bank was a key promoter of democratization efforts through a community empowerment project involving election of local councils to decide on development priorities.

A new World Bank report on Burma, leaked late in 1999, explicitly linked deteriorating economic and social conditions in Burma to the lack of progress on political reform and human rights. This set a useful precedent and example for the ongoing debate in Asia on the linkages between rights concerns and governance and development issues.