Description

This workshop on the subject of ‘Civil Society Activism for Social Justice in South East Asia’ is organised by the Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) at NUS Faculty of Law in conjunction with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. The purpose of this workshop is to compare civil society experiences across SE Asia in the context of challenges to activism and how they can be overcome. In relation to these challenges the emphasis will be on civil liberties and freedom of expression and association. We hope to be informed about these issues in a comparative context in a way that will be of great assistance to civil society organisations and activists as they find ways of furthering their advocacy for socio-economic justice for marginalised groups. The findings will also be extremely useful for several of CALS’ research and outreach programmes: on civil society in Myanmar; on migration issues; on minorities; on the non-profit sector, legal aid and access to justice; and on land grabs. We think the comparative knowledge gleaned will be very helpful also when fed back to local civil-society constituencies in Myanmar and other countries in the region.

The plan is as follows. There will be 8 participants from Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Cambodia; they will be people working on different aspects of social justice (for example, women’s rights, land grabs and peasants’ issues, environmental issues, migrant workers and other vulnerable groups). The workshop’s main session will be held in the morning of 10 December, and will be linked to another workshop CALS is hosting 10-11 December, organised by Dr Lynette Chua and our Director, Andrew Harding, on the subject of socio-legal research in SE Asia. This latter workshop will involve scholars from several different parts of the world, thought-leaders in socio-legal studies, and socio-legal researchers from SE Asia. Participants in the civil society workshop will contribute their experiences in a series of short presentations and discussions. They will be joined by some leading participants in the socio-legal workshop, in particular Professor Frank Munger of State University of New York, who is a leader in this field. The socio-legal workshop will then begin after lunch on 10 December and continue through 11 December. The civil society activists will join the socio-legal workshop and a session will be devoted to discussing the synthesised findings of the civil society workshop. This will add enormous value to the exercise, as these findings will be subject to comment from experts with broad experience of the issues across Asia and beyond. We expect that civil-society participants will benefit greatly from the socio-legal workshop discussion, and will be able to participate meaningfully in that. We expect they will also have ideas as to how research at CALS can support civil-society activism in Asia. Notes will be taken during these events and a report will be compiled by CALS.