3 August 2010 | CIL Seminar Series

Human Rights and International Criminal Law in ASEAN States – Past, Present and Future

Our expert panelists discussed developments in ASEAN, Indonesia and Cambodia in the areas of international criminal law and international human rights law.

Expert Panelists

Mr ONG Keng Yong is Director of the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is concurrently Ambassador-At-Large in the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and Singapore’s Non-Resident Ambassador to Iran. He was Secretary-General of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) from January 2003 to January 2008. He started his diplomatic career in the MFA from June 1979 and was posted to the Singapore Embassies in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and the United States of America. He was Singapore’s Ambassador to India and Nepal from 1996 to 1998. From September 1998 to December 2002, he was Press Secretary to the then Prime Minister of Singapore, Mr Goh Chok Tong. At the same time, Mr Ong held senior appointments in the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, and the People’s Association in Singapore.

Professor David COHEN has taught at the University of California, Berkeley since 1979. At UC Berkeley he is the Ancker Distinguished Professor for the Humanities and the founding Director of the Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center. Since 2000 he has collaborated on human rights projects in Asia with the East-West Center in Honolulu, a federally funded Asia-Pacific research center. There he serves as Director of the Asian International Justice Initiative and as Senior Fellow in International Law. He has monitored and reported extensively on the East Timor trials before the Special Panels for Serious Crimes in Dili and the Ad Hoc Human Rights Court in Jakarta. Cohen’s involvement with the Jakarta Ad Hoc Human Rights Court also led to what has become a multi-year program of human rights training for the Indonesian judiciary and other institutions that began in 2003 and continues to today.

Assistant Professor Mahdev MOHAN is Assistant Professor of Law at the Singapore Management University where he specializes in public international law. He is an international lawyer at the UN-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal, where he represents genocide survivors. He also directs SMU’s Asian Peace-building and Human Rights Programme which conducts research and advises scholars, policy makers and practitioners working to protect and promote peace, human rights and good governance in Asia. A former Fulbright scholar, Mahdev’s research has been awarded Stanford University’s Carl Mason Franklin Jr. Prize for International Law, and Richard S. Goldsmith Grant for International Conflict Negotiation.

Presentations

To download Ambassador Ong’s presentation in PDF format, please click here.