The Rohingya Refugee Crisis of Myanmar: A History of Persecution and Human Rights Violations

The United Nations refers to Rohingya as one of the most persecuted ethnic minorities in the world, and this minority community from the Arakan state of Myanmar crossing by land into Bangladesh, while others take to the sea to reach Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Thailand to escape from persecution. They first arrived in the Arakan on 8th century and ruled this area from 1430 AD to 1784 AD. Rohingya Muslims, along with Burmese Muslims and Buddhists together participated in their Independence movement, participated in the national election and elected as parliament member. But all the achievements and collaboration became failed after a few years later of independence. This study aims to find out the origin and historical background of Rohingya Muslim and chronological state persecution against them. This paper concludes that Rohingya are not illegal settler and their presence in Rakhine state of before the arrival of Mongolian and Tibeti Burmans. After the independence, they are victims of numerous types of oppression, such as denied citizenship, excessive taxation, confiscation of property, mosque destruction, torture, extrajudicial killing, restrictions on freedom of movement and marriage, forced deportation, destruction of houses and villages.

The Suicide of Ms. Liu and Other Chinese Persecution Stories

The chapter tells the stories of persecution, arrest, detention, torture, and in some cases extrajudicial killing of nine members of The Church of Almighty God in China. All the stories reveal the real names of the victims and are supported by documents filed with the Human Rights Council of the United Nations during the 2018 Universal Periodic Review of China and published on the website of the United Nations. They evidence a consistent pattern of repression and abuse. The victims were arrested for no other crime than being active in a banned religious group. Members of their families were also threatened and persecuted. Extra-judicial killings were covered up, and families were told that natural causes were responsible for the victims’ deaths.

IS ASEAN’S PRACTICE OF NON-INTERFERENCE AND REGIONAL PARTICULARISM PRINCIPLES A SOURCE OF HINDRANCE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS LAW ENFORCEMENT IN SOUTH EAST ASIA?

In the ages of Duterte and his extrajudicial killing policies, of Aung Sang Suu Kyi and the Rohinya systemic persecution, of Malays rejecting the ratification of International Convention for Eradication of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and other unfortunate events spanning across the region, South East Asia was largely suffering from various grave breaches of human rights violations. As the subcontinent umbrella organization, however, ASEAN’s hand has been largely tied when facing the issues pertaining in their region, despite pledging their commitment to establish protection and enactment of human rights law in its continent since 2007. Some experts say that its inability to perform meaningful actions is mainly attributable to its “non-interference policy”, a principle adopted by ASEAN with several unique characteristics that differs its practice with other organization practicing similar belief, mixed with a misguided application of implementation regarding “regional particularism”. This paper aims to understand the establishment of such principles’ implementation and how they influence the organization’s approach against violations of human rights happening under its member-states’ governments. Keywords: Human Rights Violations, Non-Interference, Regional Particularism Abstrak Pada zaman Duterte dan kebijakan pembunuhan di luar proses hukumnya, Aung Sang Suu Kyi dan penganiayaan sistemik etnik Rohingya, orang-orang Malaysia menolak ratifikasi Konvensi Internasional untuk Pemberantasan Diskriminasi Rasial (ICERD), dan berbagai peristiwa malang lainnya yang terjadi di berbagai daerah, Asia Tenggara menderita berbagai pelanggaran berat hak asasi manusia (HAM). Namun, sebagai organisasi yang memayungi sub-benua, tangan-tangan ASEAN sebagian besar terikat ketika menghadapi masalah-masalah yang berkaitan dengan wilayah mereka, meskipun berjanji untuk membangun perlindungan dan pemberlakuan undang-undang hak asasi manusia di benua itu sejak 2007. Beberapa ahli mengatakan bahwa ketidakmampuannya untuk melakukan tindakan yang berarti terutama disebabkan oleh kebijakan non-intervensi-nya, sebuah prinsip yang diadopsi oleh ASEAN dengan beberapa karakteristik unik yang berbeda praktiknya dengan organisasi lain yang mempraktikkan prinsip serupa, yang kemudian dicampur dengan implementasi “kekhususan regional” yang problematik. Artikel ini bertujuan untuk memahami pembentukan implementasi prinsip tersebut dan bagaimana hal itu mempengaruhi pendekatan organisasi terhadap pelanggaran hak asasi manusia yang terjadi di bawah pemerintahan negara-negara anggotanya. Kata Kunci: Kekhususan Regional, Non-Intervensi, Pelanggaran HAM

Drone Penalty

A different appropriation of the instant takes place in the case of extrajudicial killing by drones. That practice by the U.S., begun in 2002, has remained shrouded in secrecy. However one counts the victims, drone executions outnumber by a huge margin American judicial executions, and the drone penalty thus represents a particular paradigm of the American death penalty: for the most part out of sight and out of mind. It raises in turn questions about American democracy and the deadly criminal conduct of its foreign policy, but also produces a perspective that brings into focus the long series of historical relations between slavery and the death penalty, as well as lynching and the persistence of racism in the application of capital punishment. Furthermore, the sovereign secrecy of drone attacks produces a structural space shared by the U.S. president and the terrorist s/he attacks.

Making Nigeria Ungovernable

Chapter three captures the beginning of Boko Haram’s jihad and the initial stages of the post-2009 violence: 2009-2012, following the brutal and extrajudicial killing of Muhammad Yusuf by the Nigerian police. It catalogues the matrix of events including warfare strategy that depict Boko Haram’s clash with the Nigerian state and perceived enemies including Christians and the media. The chapter also shows a significant interaction between Boko Haram and other transnational terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and al-Qaeda central. The earliest internal schism and fractionalisation of Boko Haram that led to several splinter groups such as Ansaru-2012 are discussed in this chapter.

Interrogation of Muhammad Yusuf

(30 JULY 2009) Just before his extrajudicial killing by Nigerian security forces, Yusuf was interrogated in Maiduguri. This interrogation contradicts statements by the Nigerian Police that Yusuf was executed because of a shoot-out between him and the security forces. Below is a transcript of the interrogation...

Human Rights Norm Diffusion in Southeast Asia

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) have played an increasingly vocal role in their struggle to advance both human rights protection and promotion in Southeast Asian countries. Most notably, CSOs have become a more important actor in dealing with human rights issues in particular by virtue of their role in drawing attention to human rights violations. In the case of massive human rights violations happening in Southeast Asia, CSOs pursue various strategies to address and try to end such abuses. Spreading information of human rights violations occurring in each member state to regional peers, and then finding new allies such as international organizations to put pressure back to human rights-violating states, in what is characterized as a dynamic of the boomerang model, one of the prominent strategies CSOs use to relieve human rights violations. Another strategy recently observed involves CSOs reaching out to powerful judicial institutions whose decisions can be legally binding on a violating state. Spreding This paper applies the boomerang model theory to the efforts of CSOs, specifically with respect to their work in helping to end the extrajudicial killing of drug dealers in the Philippines during President Duterte’s tenure, to display how the dynamics of the boomerang model works and what this strategy has achieved in terms of ending the extrajudicial killings. Beyond the boomerang model, this paper further demonstrates the strategy of CSOs in reaching out directly to powerful judicial institutions, in this case the International Criminal Court (ICC). The paper discusses why CSOs pursued this strategy of reaching out to the ICC, bypassing the region’s human rights institution—the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR). Keywords: Civil Society Organizations (CSOs); Extrajudicial Killing in the Philippines; The International Criminal Court (ICC). (A previous version of this paper was presented at the 14th Asian Law Institute (ASLI) Conference hosted by the University of Philippines, College of Law (UP) in 19 May 2017. We would like to thank the commentators and the audience for their questions and comments on the paper.)