Resistance to Sexuality and Gender Diversity Rights in the ASEAN Human Rights Regime

Sexuality and gender diversity rights in Southeast Asia are deeply controversial and vigorously contested. Debate and protest have been accompanied by both legislative reform and discriminatory violence. In national and regional contexts, pushback against sexuality and gender diversity rights reform has been significant. The need for such rights is not recognised by the majority of Southeast Asian states; in contrast, a burgeoning of civil society organisations is engaged in an emancipatory politics inclusive of sexuality and gender diversity, utilising rights politics as a platform for visibility, contestation and political participation. The emergence of SOGIESC (sexual orientation, gender identity & expression, & sex characteristics) rights claiming benefitted from the inauguration of the regional ASEAN human rights regime in the early 2010s. However a critical and counter-intuitive element of this development was the specific omission of SOGIESC rights from that regime. The creation of the regime with its governmentally authorised international organisations nonetheless gave political legitimation to the use of previously suspect rights language, and enabled comparisons to best practice elsewhere – especially concerning the omitted rights. Together with National Human Rights Institutions, the UN’s Universal Periodic Review process and – critically – a plethora of regional civil society organisations, an emerging architecture of human rights advocacy can now be discerned across the region. In some contexts, this can be used effectively to advance sexuality and gender rights protections. In others, both within formal ASEAN institutions and more broadly, pushback and resistance has grown. This paper will examine the recent history and contemporary state of play with respect to sexuality and gender diversity rights in Southeast Asia. It will focus in particular on the role and potential of the regional human rights regime, auspiced by ASEAN itself, through the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights and the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. The paper will consider how advocates have attempted to utilise these international organisations to advance sexuality and gender diversity rights and politics, and examine the resistance to this within the regional rights regime, and with reference to developments in selected states within the region.