Abstracts

for the Symposium on Human Rights in Asia

Abstract for Gender and Human Rights in China and Japan

Yung-chen Chiang

My presentation will focus on how culture remains a powerful force in impacting gender and human rights issues in China and Japan today. In the case of China , son preference compounded by economic considerations continues to work to the detriment of women in society. Abiding cultural assumptions work differently in Japan , but no less crucial in shaping gender and human rights situation there.

With regard to China, I will dwell on the following three issues:

With regard to Japan, I will dwell on two issues:

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Redefining 'National Security:' Human Rights and Governance in Southeast Asia

Tun Myint

Do human rights exist, a priori, before human being was born? Are we born into a particular world where our rights are pre-defined by human-crafted institutions? To answer these questions, it is necessary to link and delink between human rights and human rules. For instance, if I were born in the U.S.A., I would become an American citizen and if I were born in Burma, I would become a Burmese citizen. Do not I have my human rights to be any citizen of the world or just as a citizen of the world in every sense of practicality? In placing human rights in the context of governance, we are forced to investigate the practical functions of human rights in maintaining human orders under human-crafted institutions. There is not much qualm about the universal definition and existence of human rights in a priori sense but there are many dimensions and definitions of human rights in the context of human crafted-institutions, which are rules, norms, strategies, and decision-making mechanisms of governance. Therefore, understanding human rights within the context of how societies maintain orders has to be a crucial endeavor in thinking and rethinking from national security to global security.

In Southeast Asia, national security has been widely defined as security of government or security of the state, not necessarily as security of citizens and communities. This is dominant perception and practice of government officials and bureaucrats within the state structures in Southeast Asia . The state being the most powerful institutional creation in social science is perceived and believed to be a benevolent actor in governance of human orders and security in Southeast Asia. Consequently, security of the state overwrites security of citizens and communities.

The challenges, I would argue, for the protection of human rights in Southeast Asia are resonated in the challenges we face in redefining national security. Hence, the state and state-building processes are not only responsible for the majority of the gross violations of human rights but also destruction of human lives and human dignity. Fairly recent example within the last few decades is the killing fields in Cambodia . Another example is ongoing civil war in Burma where the military regime, in the name of and in the defense of nation-state, has been forcing people to flee from their homes, forcing children to be soldiers, raping women, and silencing even the voices of the opposition.

Ongoing human rights violations in countries such as Burma are reported frequently in the media. However, there are also more subtle and selective human rights violations occurring in perhaps even the most democratic country of the region - Thailand. In Thailand, development projects that are crafted in the interests of the state such as hydroelectric dams are relocating the rural poor without any proper economic compensation let alone cultural, social and livelihood compensation. The most recent case in point is the case of Pak Mun Dam in the Northeast Thailand which destroyed livelihoods of over 6,000 rural people. In this presentation, I will first discuss the present condition of human rights within the context of governance in Southeast Asia. Then I will argue for and propose to redefine national security to incorporate community securities so as to achieve much desired human security. Finally, I will offer recommendations to human rights watch organizations and civil societies as to how we might enhance protection of human rights in Southeast Asia.

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Gender and Human Rights in India
Abstract

Radhika Parameswaran
School of Journalism
Indiana University

In my presentation for the April 2005 Indiana University conference on "Human Rights in Asia," I have divided my comments on gender and human rights in India into two main sections. The first part of the presentation will focus on human rights violations against Indian women in the past decade, particularly in two areas of concern: violence against women and trafficking in girls and women. In my discussion of violence against Indian women, I will provide details of rapes and sexual assaults against Indian Muslim women during the riots that took place in Gujarat, India, in 2002. My discussion of the Gujarat riots will highlight the dangers that hyper-masculine and fundamentalist state regimes and criminal justice systems pose for Indian women's safety, and thus for their basic right to lead a life free from physical and sexual abuse. In contrast to the state's failure in the Gujarat case, my brief outline of developments in the area of trafficking in girls and women will point to the Indian government's recent collaboration with the United Nations and the National Human Rights Commission in India to enact progressive policies aimed at reducing the tide of human trafficking.

In the second part of the presentation, I will shift to a topic that is more close to my teaching and research interests-news media and the important role journalism has played in India in mobilizing support for gender and human rights causes. Here, I will discuss the decreasing visibility of poverty and poor women in Indian news since the implementation of economic reforms and the rapid incursion of globalization. Towards the end, the presentation will introduce the work of P. Sainath, an outstanding Indian journalist whose work on women, poverty and human rights, has earned him Amnesty International's Global Human Rights Journalism prize in 2000. Sainath's journalism, which finds an excellent balance between documenting the exploitation of poor women and revealing their capacity to resist oppression, can serve as a model for journalists, activists, and scholars working in the area of human rights.

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Human Rights in Contemporary North and South Korea:
An Abstract

Michael E. Robinson

This presentation will discuss how the human rights situation in South Korea has changed over the last 15 years while noting a continued worsening human rights abuses in contemporary North Korea . It has become common place, but erroneous, to speak in terms of a democratized South Korea as if human rights do not remain a issue. It is better to continue to think of a democratizing South Korea , a nation feeling its way toward a free society, but still in the throws of anxiety about its own security. While South Korea has made enormous progress in terms of expanding human rights since the late 1980s, North Korea 's record continues to worsen. Objective institutions and laws that abridge even the remotest hint of dissent in the North remain. Its penal system used for both criminals and so-called political criminals remains unchanged. What has made the situation worse is the collapse of the North Korean economy and with it guarantees of even minimal food supply, housing, and work. Thus the contrasts between the two Korea 's in the area grow as the division is projected into the immediate future.

Since 1987 South Korea 's human rights record has improved dramatically. The press has been freed from decades of government censorship and intimidation. For the most part free speech is now honored in the South, and most cultural controls and other government intrusions in cultural production have ended. Most of its political prisoner has been pardoned, even a group of North Korean sympathizers and self identified communists who languished in jail for over 40 years because they refused to renounce their ideology. Moreover, with economic prosperity social spending on a minimum safety net for Korean citizens in the area of health care and old age is emerging thus providing full recognition of people's right to life and security. However, South Korea has retained, in truncated form, its notorious National Security Law (NSL). The NSL was a blanket law that prohibited citizens in the South from supporting North Korea in any way, whether in public speech, monetary contributions, or political affiliation. It also still prohibits, but it only selectively enforced, travel to the North. That the NSL continues in force remains a glaring slight against a full recognition in spirit and law of fundamental rights of free speech and movement.

South Korea 's public sphere even at times of the worst government repression never came close to the stifling atmosphere found in contemporary North Korea . There is simply no public sphere whatsoever in the North, all information and all print and electronic speech emanate from a single source, the official DPRK party line. Moreover there is even no variance detectable within party speech so assiduously has the central ideology of chu'che become the beginning and ending a virtually every thought. North Korea 's party and government institutions are based on one party rule and within the party procedures for democratic selection of party representatives and representatives to the large legitimating National Congress are in place. The actually functioning of the system insures there is no choice in elections. Moreover, the state maintains a system that catalogues in citizenry into three basic groups. There is the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class. Being classified in the later group makes one a permanent outsider in the system. The hostile class is composed of people whose origins can be traced to collaboration during the colonial period, Buddhist monks, wealthy landlords, and people whose children or relatives fled to the south during the Korean War. Thus an entire class of North Koreans are deprived of even the rights to decent food rations, housing, or work given that the other two groups are given priority in these issues. Finally North Korea's increasingly dire economic conditions wreak havoc with the fundamental rights of its citizens to food and minimally decent working and living conditions. Since the famine in 1995, food shortages have been chronic, and the government has selectively provided food to its Army and nominclatura leaving the bulk of the population to fend for itself. This has led many to flee the North for an uncertain and often miserable life in Manchuria, becoming in effect, stateless people.

In summary, the gap in human rights performance between an ameliorating situation in South Korea and worsening, even desperate conditions widens.

It would be premature to pronounce all human rights problems over in the South. The continued existence of the NSL insures this. But enormous progress has been made toward guaranteeing the fundamental rights of speech and freedom of movement. In contrast North Korea 's abusive and closed social and political system remains intact made more stringent by its economic crisis and regime paranoia.

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Gender and Human Rights in South Korea

By C. Sarah Soh, Ph.D., SFSU

(Abstract)

he Republic of Korea (commonly referred to as South Korea ) was founded in 1948 as a constitutional democracy, recognizing equality of all citizens before the law. Despite the constitutional declaration of equality, however, the centuries-old patriarchal cultural norms and values that guide gender relations in everyday life in Korean society continue to be influenced by the traditional ideology of male superiority. Nevertheless, the government and women's organizations have actively engaged in improving women's human rights, especially since the 1980s. During the allotted time of ten-to-twelve minutes of presentation, I will provide an overview of both changing and continuing patterns of gender relations at the structural level. We will take a look at the slow but steady improvements in women's representation in the political arena and their participation in the economic sector. We will also examine what legislative measures have been adopted to address the problems of gender discriminatory employment practices, the historical injustices inflicted upon the so-called "comfort women" of colonial Korea (1910-1945) by the Japanese imperial forces during the Asia Pacific War (1931-1945), domestic violence at home, and prostitution.

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HUMAN RIGHTS IN TIBET
Elliot Sperling

In retrospect it seems clear that diplomats representing the Peoples Republic of China were quite unprepared for the criticism of Chinese policies and practices in Tibet that emerged in the wake of the demonstrations that erupted in Lhasa in the fall of 1987. Confronted abroad with Western demonstrators and unsympathetic press reports, China 's response seemed ad hoc and less than adequate in engaging observers and commentators who saw the protests as part of a larger situation in which China 's repression of Tibetan nationalism and willful disregard for internationally-accepted norms for the observance of basic human rights were key elements. Indeed, official Chinese distortions of the sequence of events of 1987 and of further demonstrations in 1988 and 1989, as well as a continuing refusal to treat Western concerns about human rights seriously made it easy to dismiss the Chinese response. The basic tone of the official Chinese reaction was two-fold: the accounts being disseminated about what was transpiring in Tibet were "at variance with reality" because the human rights situation there was excellent due to the democratic reforms implemented following the end of feudal serfdom; and in any event, the human rights issue was an internal Chinese matter.

To outward appearances China seemed at the time to view the human rights issue as at best a minor annoyance-something surfacing here and there among marginal groups. It did not see it as a significant element in bilateral relations with other countries. To the contrary, the Chinese government insisted that criticism of China on human rights grounds constituted interference in China 's internal affairs. Thus, in late 1987, when China's ambassador to the U.S. was confronted by demonstrators activated by the repression visited on Tibet earlier that year he dismissed their presence with the comment that "First you look into your own affairs. Then you poke your head into the affairs of others."  Similarly, a series of U.S. Congressional resolutions deploring the human rights situation in Tibet produced, as might have been anticipated, firm rebuffs and complaints about interference in China's internal affairs. As a press release from the Chinese embassy in late 1987 put it in describing an amendment to the Foreign Relations Authorization act in December of that year by the House and Senate, "Under the signboard of protecting 'human rights,' [the amendment] grossly meddles in China 's internal affairs and openly urges the U.S. administration to interfere in these affairs."  This attitude was equally in evidence in the PRC's 1990 response to the China section in the U.S. State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1989. China characterized the relevant section as based on lies and rumors; the
Chinese ambassador to the U.S. asserted that release of the report ".violates the basic norms governing international relations, grossly interferes in China's internal affairs and seriously encroaches upon its sovereignty."

To the extent that such pronouncements were intended to quiet U.S. and international concerns about the human rights situation in Tibet they failed abjectly. In point of fact, such pronouncements were taken as evidence that China was simply trying to evade responsibility and questions vis-à-vis human rights violations in Tibet. Not surprisingly, in the last decade and a half the situation has altered greatly and China's approach to international human rights concerns is today noticeably different from what it was in 1987. This is not to say that objective considerations and open, public investigations of claims of human rights abuses in Tibet are now part of the picture. However, the period since the late 1980s has seen a greater degree of reflection on the issue of human rights in Tibet, apart from other considerations on more general aspects of the human rights question. These reflections are usually published in Chinese and stand apart from the more defensively polemical materials made available in English. There are, of course, some natural and expected continuities. Chinese articles and books on the subject do not admit that there are serious human rights violations occuring in Tibet. But they give greater weight to exploring the nature of human rights as an issue and addressing the question of why China is targeted for criticism with regard to the issue's manifestation in Tibet. In my remarks at this conference I will address the issue of China's approach to the question of human rights in Tibet by looking at some of what is discussed in Chinese-language works.

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Indonesia: Gender, democracy and violence

Margaret Sutton
Educational Policy Studies

Indonesia is a country undergoing massive social, political and cultural change. In this context, human rights in general and the rights of women in particular are very much a part of public discourse, social action and political change. As the presentation will illustrate, it is difficult to generalize about any social phenomenon in such a large and diverse nation, let alone one that is changing so rapidly. This presentation will strive nonetheless to make three major points.

First, the current political change process that began in 1997, called "Reformasi" by Indonesians, has greatly stimulated awareness and action concerning human rights in general. While abuses still exist, particularly in the two regions under military control - Aceh and Irian Jaya - the reform process has resulted in real advances in institutionalizing the human rights of Indonesians. With amendments ratified in this century, the Indonesian constitution enshrines one of the most extensive codes of human rights guaranteed by any nation. These rights are derived directly from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and include the right to decent livelihood, health care, and specific protections for children, the elderly, and the ill. While the social rights are far from being realized, they reflect a very strong social endorsement of human rights.

Second, most Indonesian cultural groups are relatively gender egalitarian. While this is a difficult claim to define and substantiate, patterns of educational participation, the high rate of economic activity among Indonesian and the general freedom of girls and women to move in public spaces contrast sharply with patterns of gender discrimination in much of South Asia . Ironically, the relative equality of women in Indonesia - along with general political repression - made it very difficult for gender activists to gain a foothold in Indonesian society prior to the current reform period. With freedom of speech and association the number of NGOs devoted to gender equality and the advancement of women has mushroomed.

Finally, and despite the above advances, there are two areas of human rights that sorely require more work. The first is violence against women, both domestic violence, which is receiving greater recognition and legal protections, and gendered violence in conflict situations, of which there is much less general awareness or even acknowledgement. Second, even as the country is democratizing, and despite a law specifying that at least 30 percent of legislative offices be held by women, women's participation in government has actually decreased with the advent of democratic elections. This trend points to underlying issues concerning women in leadership, with cultural and religious undertones.

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Human Rights in Contemporary China:
An Abstract

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

In my presentation for the April 2005 Indiana University conference on "Human Rights in Asia," I plan to focus on both enduring problems and changes over time in the People's Republic of China (PRC). I also try to strike a balance between the sophistry of some spokesmen for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who insist that the PRC respects the freedoms of all its citizens or has a human rights record that, at worst, has some minor blemishes, on the one hand, and the comments made by the harshest critics of Beijing who liken its behavior to that of the most oppressive regimes the world has ever seen. Perhaps most importantly of all, I plan to emphasize the problems with visions of the PRC that fail to take into account the important changes, both for better and for worse, that have taken place on the human rights front in the last two decades.

It is certainly true that, despite references in China's constitution to the value of various kinds of freedom (relating to everything from speech to religious belief), the CCP leadership has consistently shown itself (from the time it took national power in 1949 to the present) to have little tolerance for organizations (political or religious) that it cannot control. It is also true that today, as in the past, terrible abuses of human rights occur in the PRC. Nevertheless, when criticizing Beijing's behavior, pundits and politicians in the West, especially in the United States, sometimes misleadingly paint a picture of the PRC as an unchanging polity, arguing that, while dramatic economic shifts have occurred in China in recent years, there has been a sort of political stasis. This is not true. And, when it comes to human rights in particular, several developments are particularly noteworthy, including the following:

  1. Beijing is much less ready than it was during the Maoist era (1949-1976) to dismiss documents such as the U.N.'s "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" as illegitimate texts that are not relevant for China due to their "bourgeois" or "Western" nature. Rather, Beijing tends now to defend its record by referring to the problems that many regimes face in living up to all of the goals spelled out in these documents, to suggest that critics (including those in Washington) get their own houses in order before casting aspersions on the CCP, and at times stressing the special emphasis that Chinese have long placed on the social and economic as opposed to civil and political rights celebrated in these texts.
  2. Though it is deplorable that people in China are still persecuted at times for saying or doing things that anger the regime, they are far less likely than in the past to be persecuted simply for who they are. For example, during the worst stages of the Cultural Revolution, being related to or close friends with someone with a "bad class" background or someone who had angered the Party could have very serious consequences. Now, this sort of guilt by association or guilt by blood-tie is, thankfully, much less common. (This is a very important point, since the regimes of history that have been most egregiously tyrannical have tended to be those, as sociologist Daniel Chirot has argued, where people suffered for who they were as opposed to what they thought, said or did.)
  3. Many people in China are now able to say and do things without punishment that they were unable to say and do in earlier periods of Communist rule. For example, it is much less dangerous than in the past to tell a joke that mocks a government leader or lodge a petition of complaint against a local official.
  4. Some kinds of human rights abuses - particularly those associated with precisely the sorts of social and economic protections that Beijing often claims are especially valued in the PRC - have become more serious problems recently than they were in the past. Most notably, as privatization and anything-goes capitalism have become the order of the day, workers have much less job security and the elderly much less old-age security than in Maoist times. Moreover, though American criticism of Chinese human rights abuses still often focuses on familiar victims of persecution - intelligentsia dissidents, members of particular religious groups, etc. - one could argue that the most vulnerable population in the PRC today is made up of impoverished migrants who have come to the cities from the countryside in search of work and once there are vulnerable to exploitation and face the kind of discrimination that we tend to associate with the mistreatment of ethnic or racial minorities.

In my presentation, I will explain more fully how I think Beijing's human rights record has gotten both less problematic in some ways and more problematic in others in recent years. I will also suggest new approaches that Westerners concerned about the way the CCP treats the citizens of the PRC might want to employ in this now-changed environment.

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