Publication

This paper emphasizes that since the financial crisis of 1997, efforts by non-government and government actors in Southeast Asia to raise the profile of human rights on the ASEAN policy agenda have redoubled. Despite these developments, the author suggests that the social environment in ASEAN remains imperfect for facilitating complete norm change because government officials are unsympathetic to liberal democracy. The author stresses the need for political openness to take place at the domestic level before human rights norms will be fully accepted at the regional level and a human rights charter can be established.