Subregionalism and transgovernmentalism in the emerging regional architecture for Asian human rights governance

For decades, the Asia-Pacific region was seen as lacking any type of regional human rights system. This is no longer an accurate description. This paper will outline an emerging architecture of human rights governance that has arisen in this broad region, based on two levels or organizations. Firstly , a number of continent - wide trans - governmental networks of sub-state actors are dealing exclusively or partially with Asian human rights issues in cooperative and sometimes innovative ways. Secondly, and more recently, a growing patchwork of weak sub-regional organizations are beginning to develop certain traditional human rights competencies by, for example, adopting treaties, establishing human rights commissions, and requiring member reports. This is leading to an Asia-specific bi-level architecture of regional human rights governance. The long-term implications of this architecture are as yet unclear, as the system is still quite young, dependent on uncertain political backing, and not precisely analogous to other regional frameworks . However, this article will argue that the preliminary indications are that the two institutional levels – transgovernmental and subregional – are likely to interact in a complementary and even synergistic manner, as would be predicted by the theoretical models of Anne-Marie Slaughter and Kal Raustiala