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In his position as Deputy Director for Asia at New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), Phil Robertson has spearheaded investigations into human rights violations throughout Southeast Asia for the previous 15 years, calling out and upsetting governments of all stripes.
A lot of his work has centered on human rights, labor rights, safety of migrant staff, and counter-human trafficking efforts with a wide range of non-governmental organizations, worldwide and regional commerce union federations, and UN companies.
As Southeast Asian leaders had been gathering in Melbourne for the ASEAN-Australia Particular Summit, Robertson spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about elections and the deteriorating freedoms in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam during the last decade.
He says regional governments have accelerated their ranges of cooperation in pursuing political activists throughout borders – now termed as transnational repression – which has resulted within the jailing, disappearances and suspected killings of dissidents.
This contains activists who’re supposed to carry refugee safety standing from the United Nations, together with six Cambodians arrested by Thai authorities forward of a go to by Prime Minister Hun Manet in early February.
However there are numerous others, amongst them Laos civil society chief Sombath Somphone, Thai activist Wanchalearm Satsaksit who disappeared in Cambodia, and the Vietnamese blogger Thai Van Duong who went lacking in Thailand earlier than resurfacing in Vietnam in police custody.
Robertson additionally weighs in on media requirements in Southeast Asia, and in Western nations the place curiosity in Southeast Asia is waning. And in Australia the place journalist Antoinette Lattoufe was sacked by the ABC for reposting an HRW assertion with regard to Israel and Gaza.
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