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Free speech in Southeast Asia is under assault despite the wave of democratization that has rolled through many countries in the region, activists and UN officials said over the weekend.

One suggestion to counter this trend is to empower the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ rights body to help protect freedom of speech.

Frank La Rue, a UN special rapporteur for the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, said the Asean Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights could eventually create a regional rapporteur position for free speech.

“I was suggesting to the commissioners something like that would be interesting for the Asean human rights commission,” he said on Saturday, at the close of a two-day regional symposium in Jakarta on the criminalization of free speech, expression and opinion in Asia.

La Rue said he had stressed the need to have a rapporteur for freedom of expression because it was related to cultural rights.

“It is an expression of culture or related to the rights of free association and assembly, because freedom of assembly and peaceful demonstration is part of freedom of expression,” he said.

But La Rue cautioned that anyone appointed to the person needed to be a staunch supporter of human rights and “a friendly voice” of the people

Article 19, an independent human rights organization that works globally to protect and promote the right to freedom of expression, said in a statement over the weekend that it had noted the growing use of laws by state actors in Southeast Asia to suppress critics and dissenting voices in both traditional and new media.

“The state of freedom of expression in Southeast Asia is worrying. Governments in the region are increasingly abusing the ‘rule of law’ to carry out censorship in order to serve their own political interests,” Agnes Callamard, executive director of Article 19, said in the statement.

“While the region has been undergoing a process of democratization with the waning of authoritarian governance in the last two decades, state actors in Southeast Asia are becoming more sophisticated and subtle in their attempts to censor and restrict opinions and expressions,” Callamard said.

“We urge the civil society and international community to persistently monitor censorship in Southeast Asia and protect the right to freedom of expression.”

Rafendi Djamin, the Indonesian commissioner for the AICHR, welcomed La Rue’s proposal, saying it was a good idea.

He told the Jakarta Globe that technically creating such position was possible under the commission’s terms of references, but it would require a consensus among the 10 commissioners representing each of the Asean member nations.

It is understandable that better protection and promotion of freedom of expression should be a priority in the region, Rafendi said, since it encompasses fundamental rights that are not just civil and political, but also social and cultural.

“It also includes rights for development as well as seeking and accessing information,” he said.