ASEAN Human Rights Declaration

The ASEAN Human Rights Declaration is a human rights instrument adopted unanimously by the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations at a meeting in Phnom Penh on 18 November 2012, following drafting by the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights established in 2009. Spanning forty paragraphs under six headings and covering roughly 600 million people, it affirms the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and goes beyond it in explicitly naming rights such as safe drinking water and sanitation and a safe, clean and sustainable environment, though it has drawn criticism from rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for clauses they say could be used to subordinate individual rights to national context or public morality.