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NORTHEAST ASIA
Shining a light on racial profiling
A Muslim woman is seeking to hold the Tokyo Metropolitan Government accountable for an alleged racial profiling of herself and her children by the city’s police, who have long been accused of targeting foreigners and perpetuating racism in the Northeast Asian country.
In a May 18, 2024 story by the Mainichi Japan, the 40-year-old woman – who has filed for damages, totaling 4.4 million yen (US$28,000), over alleged discrimination and mistreatment by police – said they were expecting a verdict by the Tokyo District Court within the month.
One of her lawyers, Hirokatsu Nakajima, said: “Police officers exercising their public authority should not discriminate, nor encourage discrimination.”
The woman’s case stems from a June 2021 incident wherein a man in a Tokyo park accused the woman’s 3-year-old daughter of kicking his son and made discriminatory remarks. The police took the woman and her daughter to a police station for three hours of questioning, demanding she admit to the allegations.
The lawsuit is emblematic of the broader problem of alleged racial profiling and police misconduct in Japan. While Japan faces a shrinking population and a growing need for workers, implementing friendlier immigration policies faces resistance from some conservative lawmakers “who like to push the narrative that Japan is a completely homogenous society,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) program officer Teppei Kasai told ABC.
In a Feb. 1 statement, Kasai also called on the Japanese government to “end and remedy abusive police practices by developing and effectively implementing laws and policies that define and prohibit racial profiling by law enforcement officials, whose standards were developed by the U.N. Human Rights Office in 2020.
HRW previously appealed to Japan to formulate laws that define and prohibit racial profiling by law enforcing officials.
Last month, Mainichi Japan also released a report saying that police in a west Japanese prefecture engaged in “persistent and systematic racial profiling” against foreigners.
A 2021 study found racial profiling of foreigners to be widespread, and a more recent survey by the Tokyo Bar Association showed that people of Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern descent were stopped by police such as while they were shopping.
In January 2024, three foreign-born residents filed a lawsuit against the Japanese state and local governments for frequent police questioning based solely on ethnicity. One of the plaintiffs alleged that the police had questioned him “at least 70 times” since he began living in Japan in 2002.
SOUTHEAST ASIA
Investigating an activist’s untimely death
Rights groups have called for an independent investigation into the death of a 28-year-old Thai pro-democracy activist who had passed away after a 110-day hunger strike against her own detention, saying it was a stark example of the country’s harsh treatment of its activists.
In separate statements, Amnesty International and Article 19 called Netiporn “Bung” Sanesangkhom’s death via cardiac arrest a “horrifying indictment” of Thailand’s justice system and a “wake-up call” for them to drop charges and release all human rights defenders unjustly detained.
“(We call) on the Thai government to align its actions with its aspirations for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council by demonstrating a genuine commitment to the protection of free expression and the rule of law,” said Article 19 Senior Director of Programmes David Diaz-Jogeix.
Amnesty International’s Thailand director Piyanut Kotsan, meanwhile, urged the international community to pressure the Thai government to “end its systematic, ongoing repression including the denial of the right to temporary release on bail.”
Netiporn had been facing charges of violating the draconian lese majeste law for interviewing people at a Bangkok shopping mall for their opinion on road traffic controls when royal motorcades are traveling.
The charges were initiated against her in 2022 – during which she was detained for at least 64 days until she was granted bail – but was returned to detention after authorities sentenced her to a month’s detention for contempt of court.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin called Netiporn’s death a “tragic incident,” and ordered the Ministry of Justice to investigate the case.
Netiporn was also part of the peaceful pro-democracy reform protests in July 2020, after which Thai authorities have implemented a wide-ranging crackdown on peaceful protest and online discussion. Officials have used vaguely worded laws on security, the monarchy, and computer crimes to repress dissent, interpreting the peaceful exercise of human rights as threats to security, public order, or offenses to the monarchy.
Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, a legal advocacy group, said that since the start of those protests from July 2020 to March 2024, at least 1,954 people have been prosecuted or charged for their participation in political assemblies and for speaking out, with 270 charged with lese majeste.
Last month, two women activists – who had been engaged with both the U.N Human Rights Council and Amnesty International campaigns – were indicted on royal defamation and computer crimes supposedly for being administrators of a Facebook page that made “defamatory posts” against the monarchy.
SOUTH ASIA
Search for elusive justice
Fifteen years since the end of a brutal uprising that saw thousands of Sri Lankans forcibly disappeared, Sri Lanka’s government has yet to ensure accountability for these violations, a new report released by the U.N. Human Rights Office (OHCHR) said.
On May 17, the OHCHR called on the Sri Lankan government to take “meaningful action to determine and disclose the fates and whereabouts” of the over 13,000 victims of enforced disappearance and to hold the perpetrators to account.
“The Government owes it to all those who have been forcibly disappeared. It is critical for these crimes to be investigated fully. These crimes haunt not only their loved ones, but entire communities and Sri Lankan society as a whole,” said U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk.
At least 70,000 to 100,000 were killed, while 20,000 – mostly Tamils – remain missing following the decades-long civil war waged between government forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
The OHCHR found that while the government has taken “some positive formal steps” – from the ratification of an international convention against enforced disappearances to the establishment of offices for missing persons and reparations, “tangible progress on the ground towards comprehensively resolving individual cases has remained limited.”
For example, even though Sri Lanka has established successive commissions of inquiry to look into these cases, only a few of their reports have been made public, and only a handful of their recommendations have been implemented.
In fact, rights advocates have been cautioning the government against setting up its planned new Truth and Reconciliation Commission, arguing it is not aligned with victims’ demands and is unlikely to produce any tangible outcome just like all previous commissions.
Data from the International Truth and Justice Project showed that since 1956, Sri Lanka has established at least 36 truth commissions to seek accountability over a myriad of alleged abuses, from “outbreaks of civil disturbance” (1956); assassinations of public figures (1963, 1995, 2006); and enforced disappearances (1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2006, 2013). More than a third of these COIs never published their reports.
In 2022, Amnesty International published a scathing report saying that Sri Lanka’s commissions of inquiry actually perpetuate a culture of impunity in the country after repeatedly failing to bring perpetrators to account.
GLOBAL / REGIONAL
An earnest plea for an end to Rohingya oppression
Southeast Asian parliamentarians are sounding the alarm on a potential mass killing of Rohingya civilians in Myanmar following reports that the rebel Arakan Army were indiscriminately attacking members of the minority group in northern Rakhine state.
“There is no doubt that if no action is taken, countless lives will be lost, with even more displaced from their homes, further exacerbating the refugee crisis in the region,” ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) Chair and Indonesian Member of Parliament Mercy Chriesty Barends said on May 18.
“The Rohingya people have already experienced so much adversity for so long; allowing further atrocities against them to go unanswered would be [unforgivable] …”
Barends’ statement was prompted by reports that the Arakan Army – one of the many ethnic armed groups fighting the junta that deposed Myanmar’s civilian government in 2021 – launched a brutal offensive in Buthidaung town in Rakhine, setting a school and a hospital on fire, and forced Rohingya to flee while others died and sustained injuries.
A spokesperson for the Arakan Army, however, denied these allegations in a message to the Associated Press. But Aung Kyaw Moe, a Rohingya who is deputy minister for human rights in the resistance movement’s shadow National Unity Government, said Buthidaung had been burned to “a pile of ash” and that its residents had fled to rice fields outside of town.
“A comprehensive and impartial investigation needs to be carried out and those responsible must be held accountable,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “Revolution against the military dictatorship is not a license to do anything you want.”
This is not the first time the Rohingya were caught in the crossfire of the liberation movement. Both the junta and some of the nationalist rebel groups have targeted the largely Muslim community and often branded them as “terrorist organizations” and “savage Bengali Muslim terrorists.”
While persecution of the Rohingya dates back to at least the 1970s, the crackdown hit fever pitch in 2017, when Myanmar authorities launched a brutal crackdown against the persecuted ethnic minority.
Many of them fled to Bangladesh and later to third countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia, triggering a region-wide refugee crisis that has been exacerbated by the junta’s coup in 2021.
Country | Estimated Rohingya refugees |
Bangladesh | 900,000 |
Indonesia | 1,700 |
Malaysia | 108,860 |
Thailand | 470 |
Note: Save for Thailand (which was based on 2023 numbers), the estimated Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia are based on 2024 numbers.
Source: UNHRC, Mixed Migration, Al Jazeera, MSF