This study was conducted to report on data collection on human rights violations in Southeast Asia that occurred throughout 2010. The countries that are the focus of research are Brunei, Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Thailand. This research seeks to emphasize the importance of the issue of human rights violations for the democratization process in Southeast Asia. Human rights violations are important to note because the high – low levels of human rights violations are often closely related to the quality of a country ‘s democracy. Certainly democracy is a far more complicated issue than the extent of human rights abuses. However, it is not always the case that the implementation of human rights in a country is linear with the quality of democracy, but it is able to encourage democratization process in a more perfect form, because in this situation the public has more awareness about the fulfillment of their rights so they are able to participate in the process development of the country through the channeling of its aspirations. Thus, the data generated by this study may provide some sort of preliminary assessment of the course of democratization especially in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. The same research report also provides a rough idea of the level of coercion and political exclusion in countries such as Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
The main objective of this study is to find links between human rights violations with some important structural factors, namely economic prosperity, number and diversity of ethnic groups, levels of conflict and violence, and democracy. The four structural factors above are chosen not without reason. This linkage is important to discover and demonstrate that discussions of human rights abuses do not get caught up in discussions that overly emphasize formal legal aspects. It should be noted that this study is not ruling out the significance of the legal-formal dimension in examining human rights issues. Instead society is being encouraged to broaden the horizons of understanding by looking at and considering the more diverse and complex sociopolitical factors that have historically always had an impact on the level of human rights abuses in a country. This research is expected to give birth to several hypotheses-as arguably long-debated-that require further proof in explaining the causes of human rights violations.
The research was conducted by collecting data through the reporting of human rights violations in a number of national media covering print media in the form of daily newspaper Kompas and Tempo; and electronic media covering Kompas, the Jakarta Post, the Brunei Times, Borneo Bulletin, Brunei Pelita, Manila Times, Phnom Penh Post, the Star, Bangkok Post, Thanh Nien, Vientiane Times, Myanmar Times, Strait Times, BBC Pages, Human Rights Watch, Compassdirect, Amnesty International, RSF and Peacemakers.