Abstract

Asia has long been the only region without an institutionalized human rights framework. ¹ Yet it is difficult to envisage the form that a human rights mechanism might take for the whole of such a heterogeneous region. For a subregion such as that already institutionalized by ASEAN, however, the latent possibility for such a mechanism has been the focus of human rights proponents for several decades – a focus that has very recently, in 2009, resulted in an ASEAN human rights body (AHRB): the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (the AICHR).