June 2020 Archives

The Asia-Pacific Human Rights Information Center (HURIGHTS OSAKA) celebrates the publication of the 100th issue of its newsletter.

The first issue of the newsletter came out in February 1995. It featured the proceedings of the formal inauguration of HURIGHTS OSAKA on 7 December 1994. The newsletter was named HURIGHTS OSAKA Newsletter.

Speeches made during the inauguration ceremonies stressed issues in the Asia-Pacific region as much as challenges that HURIGHTS OSAKA had to deal with in fulfilling its role in the region. Professor Kinhide Mushakoji, then Chairperson of the Board of HURIGHTS OSAKA, stressed the universality of human rights “not because of the formal legal style they are written in, but because the idea … of human rights itself is universal.” He emphasized the need to take into serious account the histories and traditions of the peoples in the region in promoting the universality of human rights. Mr Thomas McCarthy, Senior Adviser for United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, stressed the importance of regional and subregional mechanisms that would facilitate “broader regional cooperation and information exchange” within the region as well as with the United Nations. He cited the role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in this regard. Finally, Ms Aurora de Dios, Associate Professor in Miriam College in the Philippines, proposed that HURIGHTS OSAKA establish a collection of materials on the “social, economic and political condition of Asian peoples.” She also suggested the collection of human rights education materials. Mr Jose Ayala-Lasso, the first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, sent a message that stressed the importance of human rights education and that HURIGHTS OSAKA “will undoubtedly have an important impact on the promotion and protection of human rights nationally, regionally and internationally.”

These ideas would subsequently be reflected in the contents of the newsletter in the years to come.

Widening Reach and Issues

The name of the newsletter was changed to FOCUS Asia-Pacific in its third issue (March 1996). The new name indicates the character of the publication - a medium that examines Asia-Pacific issues, brings out the different voices of peoples in the region on human rights concerns, and promote the international human rights standards. The name is also meant to emphasize information exchange among peoples and institutions within the wide Asia-Pacific region.

Printed copies of the FOCUS Asia-Pacific newsletter are sent mainly to non-governmental organizations, human rights institutions, government offices/libraries and human rights centers in Asia and the Pacific. 

The newsletter strives to cover issues from different subregions of Asia (West, Central Northeast, Southeast and South Asia) and the Pacific.

Aside from issues, the articles cover almost the whole range of human rights (civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights), human rights practice (local, national and regional work) and human rights institutions (non-governmental organizations, museums, human rights centers and national/subregional human rights institutions).

The newsletter features articles grouped under specific themes. The articles from Jordan, Kyrgyzstan and Fiji on local community human rights work in the December 2019 issue of the newsletter illustrate this approach.¹ These articles provide a variety of experiences on local community human rights work in West and Central Asia and the Pacific.

There are articles that highlight the histories of communities. This is the case of articles on displaced communities such as the Urdu-speaking people in Bangladesh, the Vietnamese community in Cambodia, Indonesians in the Philippines and Vietnamese refugees in Japan.

Series of articles on particular topics such as the cultures in Asia and the human rights concept, human rights education, Asia-Pacific inter-governmental human rights workshops, national and regional human rights mechanisms, access to justice, the International Criminal Court, human rights cities and business and human rights are featured.

There are several articles about refugees and asylum seekers, indigenous peoples, children, persons with disabilities, women, minorities (social, cultural, religious and sexual), trafficking in person, migration, discrimination and minorities, health and human rights, and globalization.

Common-themed articles from different subregions or networks are published together in one or more issues of the newsletter to stress diversity of perspectives and richness of experiences in Asia-Pacific. This approach also facilitates the dissemination of articles/information outside the subregion or organizational network where they come from.

Citations

Random online search of materials that cite articles of the newsletter provides information on the type of literature involved as well as issues and rights being discussed.

Articles have been cited in different types of print and online literature including doctoral and masteral theses, books, journals, reports, training manuals, websites (databases, libraries) and also blogs. There are university syllabuses that list articles as reading materials.

The cited articles discuss different human rights and human rights-related issues. Many books and journals cite articles on human rights mechanisms including national human rights institutions (in Thailand, Malaysia, Timor Leste, Korea, and Fiji) and a subregional human rights mechanism (ASEAN Inter-governmental Commission on Human Rights). Some cite articles on the lobby for the establishment of a national human rights institution in Japan. Books and journals also cite articles on indigenous peoples, trafficking in persons, culture and human rights, child rights, human rights education, violence against women, domestic violence, Rome Statute/International Criminal Court, and business and human rights.

On the other hand, reports and training manuals (produced by United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations and other institutions) cite articles on economic, social and cultural rights (housing rights, rights of farmers, rights of migrant workers, right to health), development and human rights, access to justice/legal assistance along with those on minorities and specific sectors (women, children, persons with disabilities, urban poor, migrant workers, refugees, indigenous peoples and sexual minorities).

Many blogs cite articles on minorities (non-nationals, and religious, social groups), indigenous peoples, children, trafficking and human rights mechanisms (national and subregional). A few blogs cite articles on human rights and culture, housing rights and sexual minorities.

Contributors

FOCUS Asia-Pacific newsletter thrives on widely disseminating information on the efforts and experiences of individuals and institutions toward achievement of human rights in Asia and the Pacific. Most of them established their first contact with HURIGHTS OSAKA because of our request for articles. Some of them have been recommended by individuals and institutions known to HURIGHTS OSAKA.

Ultimate Goal

One of the aims of HURIGHTS OSAKA is to contribute to the promotion of human rights in the Asia-Pacific region. This is mainly done through its information/material gathering and dissemination system. The publications in English,² its English website and occasional activities such as research projects and workshops constitute the dissemination system.

The FOCUS Asia-Pacific newsletter plays a big role in achieving this aim. It has shown its capacity to cover human rights issues from the subregions of Asia and the Pacific, to engage individuals and institutions from many countries in preparing articles, and to facilitate the “crossing of borders” that network and subregional peculiarities have somehow hindered.
The different contexts of Asia and the Pacific define the articles that illustrate how the international human rights standards are protected, promoted and realized at the local and national levels.

Twenty-five years after the first issue came out, the FOCUS Asia-Pacific newsletter continues to promote human rights in Asia and the Pacific.

Jefferson R. Plantilla is the Chief Researcher of HURIGHTS OSAKA.

For further information, please contact HURIGHTS OSAKA.

Endnotes
1    See this issue of FOCUS Asia-Pacific, March 2020, Volume 99 in www.hurights.or.jp/archives/focus/.
2    The list of English publications is available at the website of HURIGHTS OSAKA.
3    The website of HURIGHTS OSAKA organizes the articles of the newsletter in terms of region, country, issue, sector and special concerns.
 

Even as India continues to grapple with rapidly rising number of COVID-19 infections, the Muslim minority in the country is facing an additional threat--increasing Islamophobia.

Instead of forging unity against a common threat, the pandemic ended up deepening the existing religious divisions in the country and adding to the marginalization of religious minorities.

Muslim Congregation

The narrative of blaming Muslims for the pandemic can be traced to March 2020, when a number of people associated with the Islamic proselytizing organization Tablighi Jamaat were found to be COVID-19 positive.

It was found that they contracted the infection at an international congregation of the organization held in New Delhi in the second week of March. As Tablighi Jamaat is a transnational organization, the congregation was attended by representatives from across the world.

This meet took place before the Indian government placed a lockdown and before it began actively screening people at airports. The government had also given permission for this congregation to be held.

So instead of questioning the government on why international travelers--that too from countries with a high number of COVID-19 cases--were allowed to enter India, much of the media narrative focused on blaming Muslims. Terms like "Corona Jihad" were frequently used in television media, in effect, projecting patients as terrorists.

This led to an unprecedented stigmatization of Indian Muslims across the country. There were numerous incidents of Muslims being targeted in this period - from Muslim fisherfolk being attacked in the southern province of Karnataka to a Muslim dairy owner committing suicide in the northern province of Himachal Pradesh, after being subjected to a social boycott by local Hindus.

Citizenship Amendment Act

The COVID-19 lockdown also witnessed another disturbing trend?the arrest of several Muslim civil society activists by the law enforcement agencies. One of the activists, a young student from Jamia Millia Islamia University named Safoora Zargar, was put in prison despite being four months pregnant. Another activist, Khalid Saifi, founder of the organization United Against Hate, was beaten up by the police in custody.

All these activists have been leading the protests against what is known as the Citizenship Amendment Act, a legislation passed by the ruling government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Act seeks to provide citizenship to persecuted minorities from India's neighboring countries, except Muslims.

Naturally, the Act is seen as discriminatory by Indian Muslims and sparked protests in different parts of the country. The protests began in December 2019 and protesters had to face attacks from the police as well as from rightwing goons.

However, on 24 February 2020, the attacks on the protesters snowballed into full-fledged sectarian violence in the Northeast District of India's capital Delhi, barely a few miles from where US President Donald Trump was meeting Indian leaders during his visit to India.

The violence continued for two days, killing over fifty people and displacing hundreds. Over two-thirds of those killed and nearly 90 percent of those who were displaced happened to be Indian Muslims.

However in its probe into the Delhi riots, the police pushed the narrative that the violence was a "pre-planned conspiracy" by people protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act and several people leading the protests?like Zargar and Saifi mentioned earlier?had been arrested under the draconian anti-terror law, Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. In effect, peaceful protests by Indian Muslims have been criminalized.

The crackdown on protesters as well as the rising Islamophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic present new obstacles for Indian Muslims. It is clear that the space for articulation of Muslim grievances and legitimate political demands has shrunk considerably.

Now, any mobilization by Indian Muslims will be seen with much more hostility by law enforcement agencies as well as sections of the majority Hindu community.

Therefore, the main challenge for Indian Muslims would be how to find their voice in these difficult circumstances and counter rising Islamophobia in the country.

Aditya Menon is an Indian journalist.

For further information, please contact Aditya Menon through his e-mail address: amenon.india@gmail.com.

Since the beginning of 2020, the new coronavirus (COVID-19) started to spread in many parts of the world at an incredible speed and the number of infected persons exponentially increased. On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized COVID-19 as a pandemic. The entire world has been seriously affected by the pandemic. No country and society have been spared.

Responses to the pandemic and measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 have been drastic in many countries, including lockdowns and quarantines. In Japan, the government declared on 16 April 2020 a state of emergency for the entire country that restricted people’s movement and business activities.

Under the emergency measures, people have experienced various difficulties, not only being exposed to the risk of virus infection but also loss of jobs and income, suspension or restriction of civil, political, economic, social and cultural activities. Damages are widely inflicted on people in general, but particularly and seriously on the vulnerable and socially marginalized people.

From the beginning of the pandemic, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stressed that “human dignity and rights need to be front and centre” in the governments’ effort to mitigate the negative impact on people and their lives provoked by the anti-pandemic measures. Other United Nations agencies issued similar statements and guidelines to deal with the pandemic. International, national and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also take this crisis caused by the pandemic as a serious human rights concern and have appealed to the governments to protect and respect human rights especially at this time of pandemic.

In this situation of the pandemic, civil society organizations including NGOs have important roles to play. Acutely aware of this, the Asia-Pacific Human Rights Information Center (HURIGHTS OSAKA) has taken up its role as a human rights information center. It has been accumulating and posting as much information as possible on human rights and the new coronavirus pandemic on its Japanese-language website. It aims to focus on the human rights perspective of the information collected and disseminated and to draw attention of the national government, local authorities, those working in the frontlines and the general public in Japan to the difficulties experienced by the affected people and also to their appeals directed to the authorities.

HURIGHTS OSAKA seriously takes up this role as a human rights information center.

HURIGHTS OSAKA - Inception and Transformation

HURIGHTS OSAKA was not what it is now. It has come through a few substantial changes since its establishment.

HURIGHTS OSAKA was established in 1994 by the initiative of a group of civil society organizations in Osaka, joined by an association of labor unions, a business association, and the association of mayors of cities and townships of Osaka Prefecture. The governments of the Prefecture and the City of Osaka supported its establishment as a public foundation with substantive financial, administrative and logistical contribution. At the time of its establishment, HURIGHTS OSAKA was conceived as a human rights information center aiming at actively developing international cooperation with human rights organizations in the Asia Pacific region as well as cultivating awareness of human rights among the local general public in Japan, with a certain degree of official involvement of the Osaka Prefecture and the City of Osaka. In a way, HURIGHTS OSAKA acted as a close partner of the Osaka prefectural and city governments in implementing human rights-related policies and projects.

The original aims of HURIGHTS OSAKA were set as wide and far reaching as follows: 1. to promote human rights in the Asia Pacific region; 2. to contribute to the advancement of international human rights protection and promotion with Asia Pacific specific inputs; 3. to ensure inclusion of human rights perspectives in the Japanese official international cooperation and contribution in the Asia Pacific region; and 4. to build awareness among the general public of the international standards of human rights. 

The situation surrounding HURIGHTS OSAKA changed drastically with the election of a new Governor of Osaka Prefecture in February 2008. The Governor considered support to a large number of organizations incorporated and registered in the Prefecture for social, cultural and human rights purposes and activities as a “waste of public funds” and vowed to discontinue it. HURIGHTS OSAKA was one of these organizations. Stating that no justifiable reason was found to continue substantial support to HURIGHTS OSAKA, the Prefecture decided to discontinue completely its financial, administrative and logistic support to HURIGHTS OSAKA from the fiscal year of 2009. Without hesitation, Osaka City also withdrew support to HURIGHTS OSAKA. The sudden loss of substantial support from both local governments left HURIGHTS OSAKA with no choice but to reconsider its role and to work out its operational strategy. Downsizing the organizational setup and budget, it had to prioritize projects and operations. It reached a conclusion that HURIGHTS OSAKA should focus more on the needs of people, become more actively responsive to the local human rights situations and issues and reorganize its information management using the information and communication technology. Consequently, it had to reduce its international engagements such as organizing international human rights conferences and seminars as well as participating in human rights events outside Japan. It came to concentrate more on information management and awareness building on human rights issues and activities. Relying on its own funds, HURIGHTS OSAKA was reborn as a civil society organization, no more dependent on the support from the Osaka Prefecture and the City of Osaka. It was a new start as an independent “human rights information center.”

In 2011, HURIGHTS OSAKA experienced another organizational reform following the revision of the law governing public interest corporations. As an organization incorporated and registered in Osaka Prefecture, HURIGHTS OSAKA put more emphasis on staying close to local human rights issues and contributing to the local needs. This included responding to the needs of the business sector in Osaka in building human rights awareness and incorporating respect for human rights in the business practice.

HURIGHTS OSAKA’s Role and the COVID-19 Pandemic

HURIGHTS OSAKA is expected to remain attentive to the needs of people.

In the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, the vulnerable and socially neglected people have been suffering most. This is certainly the case in Japan. These people are, just to name a few: people with underlying health conditions; people in poverty, including single mothers and children; children without adequate schooling; the aged; people with disabilities; homeless people; those with unstable employment and the jobless; migrants and their families; irregular immigrants and applicants for refugee status who are confined indefinitely in the detention centers; women facing widespread gender discrimination; those exposed to domestic violence. Their precarious conditions require the serious attention of the national government, the local authorities and the society in general.

HURIGHTS OSAKA definitely is in a position to accumulate information in cooperation with those organizations wishing to share their first-hand information on people who face extraordinary difficulty and disseminate it widely so that the society is informed of their plight and what needs to be done with an emphasis on the primary consideration of their human dignity and rights.

Furthermore, together with other civil society organizations, HURIGHTS OSAKA is able to send out human rights alert messages that emergency measures taken by the government and local authorities may infringe the human rights of people through unchecked utilization of surveillance methods and overwhelming control of people’s behavior and their personal data. The guarantee of access to information, transparency and accountability in the imposition of emergency measures to deal with the pandemic must be emphasized in such messages addressed to the government.

HURIGHTS OSAKA is expected to actively assume the role of a human rights information center, even if it sometimes has to disseminate information and messages inconvenient to the government and the local authorities. After all, HURIGHTS OSAKA has committed itself to protecting and promoting human dignity and human rights of all.  

Osamu Shiraishi is the President of the Asia-Pacific Human Rights Information Center (HURIGHTS OSAKA).

For further information, please contact HURIGHTS OSAKA.