Kanae Doi is the Japan Director of Human Rights Watch (HRW).  She posted a short but important little piece on the HRW site last week.  Her thoughts, a plea really, highlight the great failure of Japan to play a major and sustained role in the spread of human rights in Asia.

Doi’s argument could also act as an Asian policy blueprint for an activist and enlightened Canadian government, were such a thing to reappear at any point.

Japan’s immediate neighbourhood in Asia is not a happy place for large swaths of the population.  China is an aggressively capitalist but strangely authoritarian empire where human security is well down the list of government policy objectives.  South Korea, a military dictatorship until the late 1980s, still has issues with heavy-handed police services and turns a blind eye to the mistreatment of migrant workers.  The Russian Far East presents a tableau of organized crime, government corruption and the abusive treatment of migrants and refugees.

Doi and HRW Japan used their release to slam Japan’s longstanding reticence to speak out in international fora against the manifold human rights abuses that surround them in Northeast Asia, and Asia writ large.

China comes in for special attention by HRW Japan.  China lacks an independent judiciary, a free press and many other markers of a free society.  There is little if any concern about the wider environmental impact of China’s astounding economic growth.  Political freedoms are non-existent.

Doi insists that it is in Japan’s own interests for China to go the way of democracy.  As a strategic matter, any form of Japan-led or even just Japan-sponsored economic or security regime will need partners that are as committed to the notion of free press, free assembly, and free commerce as Japan so obviously is.

Japan will face severe economic challenges in the coming years…challenges that can only be mediated by Japan’s engagement with its Asian neighbours in a regime of trade and security cooperation oriented around the liberal tenets of free politics, free markets and active engagement with international organizations such as the UN and its subsidiary bodies.

Beyond China, another area highlighted by HRW Japan is aid to civilian victims of conflict in Asia.  Doi highlighted Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka and Burma as potential venues for Japanese humanitarian intervention. A more generous application of the concept of human security would find examples much closer to home for Doi and HRW Japan to concentrate on.

The economic collapse has displaced millions of workers in Japan who are now un- or under-employed.  Homelessness in Tokyo and other major cities is an epidemic.  Migrant workers, usually fully documented, are treated poorly.  And the notorious Asian sex trade has an eager entrepot in Japan where the dehumanization of women and children continues apace, for profit.

I have written elsewhere that Northeast Asia accounts for about one-third of Canada’s non-USA two-way trade.  Canada thus has profound economic interests in this part of the Pacific World… our neighbourhood.  Canada should advocate for an Asian security and economic architecture which puts pressure on the Chinas, the North Koreas… and the Japans… to fall into line on the global consensus surrounding human rights and human security.

Japan is a leading Asian democracy, and I would argue that Canada is as well.  Or at least, Canada should view itself that way in an activist and interventionist sense.

The HRW Japan piece can be found here:

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/08/02/human-rights-should-be-kans-foreign-policy-priority