The Human Rights Resource Centre is a non-profit academic centre headquartered at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, with a partnership network throughout Southeast Asia (currently in 7 out of 10 ASEAN Member States). The Centre was established in 2010 by several of the original members of the Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism, as well as other prominent regional human rights advocates and academics, all of whom have been engaged in the protection and promotion of human rights for several decades.  The Centre has been accorded consultative status by the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) in November 2016.

The Centre was established to foster an institutional network that would produce high-quality, independent, research on human rights issues of most pressing concern to the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and aims to shape the discourse on human rights in ASEAN. The Centre also supports the human rights agenda of the AICHR, especially through public education, research and training programmes. Through pedagogical initiatives with partners both within and outside ASEAN, the Centre hopes to build the capacities of researchers, promote knowledge exchange, and support the protection and promotion of human rights in the Centre’s core thematic areas (namely, rule of law; business and human rights; and the rights of vulnerable populations).

The Centre’s mission is to support a rights-based approach to ASEAN integration, a process which formally began with the ratification of the ASEAN Charter in 2008 and which is ongoing. The ten member states of ASEAN have committed to adopting a rights-based approach to integration in Article 1(7) of the Charter, a commitment which they strengthened by adopting of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration in 2012.

Our vision is to foster an informed ASEAN community, in which all ASEAN peoples know and understand their rights and are able to realise them.