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decade on from installing necessary safeguards, the attitude toward human rights protection in Southeast Asia has barely changed, a former top Indonesian diplomat has said in a scathing review of the human rights discourse in the region.

Former foreign minister Hassan Wirajuda recently said the region’s commitment to human rights had yet to make significant progress even after the establishment of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) in 2009.

Hassan said most ASEAN member states besides Indonesia had not shown a serious attitude on the handling of human rights issues, as they lean into what he calls the “excessive use of the noninterference principle” to deflect criticism from its neighbors on “domestic issues”.

He then called on Indonesia, which he described as the loudest member state to voice concern on human rights in the region, to avoid making use of the principle and instead be affirmative in addressing human rights violations in the region.

“Every human rights violation basically breaches the human rights’ highest provision stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is what Indonesia should keep addressing — it shouldn’t count as intervening,” he said earlier this month. “Isn’t it normal for [an ASEAN] family member to want to make sure all goes well with other members?”

He also expressed his pessimism that the AICHR, which was recently given the mandate by ASEAN leaders to assist in the repatriation of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar’s Rakhine State, could make significant and essential contributions to the ongoing conflict.

The AICHR’s terms of reference (TOR) still retain an imbalance between the work of promoting and protecting human rights, he said of the point of contention that Jakarta had raised in 2009. It was under Hassan’s guidance that Indonesia helped lay the groundwork to establish ASEAN’s human rights body.

“At that time, in a ministerial-level meeting, I honestly stated that Indonesia rejected the TOR — we were the only one rejecting it,” he told The Jakarta Post. “We eventually agreed on the TOR [after I was given assurances that it] would be reviewed five years later and be declared in an ASEAN leaders’ statement [...] but up until now, there hasn’t been any review, has there?”

Moreover, he said the commitment to human rights was already enshrined in Article 14 of the ASEAN Charter that was adopted in 2007, and that its implementation through the AICHR remained in question.

Separately, the Foreign Ministry’s director general for ASEAN cooperation, Jose Tavares, conceded that there was little in the way of progress on regional human rights discourse, especially in the abuse of the noninterference principle. “They are only ready at this point in time to have this level of engagement,” he said during a debriefing of last month’s ASEAN Summit in Singapore, hosted by the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia.

Southeast Asia has been beset by a number of alleged human rights violations, beginning with the impunity of the military in Cambodia and Thailand, summary killings in the Philippines’ war against drugs and the plight of the Rohingya, which United Nations investigators say resulted from the Myanmar military carrying out mass killings with “genocidal intent”.

In a joint statement issued under the banner of the ASEAN Peoples’ Forum ahead of the November summit, 200 civil society organizations called on ASEAN member states to “implement their obligations under international human rights treaties and standards” and “strengthen the mandate within the AICHR’s terms of reference [so it may] address key human rights issues in the region”.