Safeguarding Freedom of Religion or Belief to Prevent Conflicts and Mass Atrocities in Southeast Asia: the Role of Parliamentarians

Abstract Southeast Asia is vulnerable to conflicts and has a long history and present dealings with various forms of human rights violations and atrocities. At the same time, the region lacks a strong human rights mechanism to ensure protection, redress, and accountability. This paper thus argues that parliamentarians should vitalise their roles and enhance synergies with existing asean mechanisms and entities to strengthen the protection of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) and the prevention of conflicts and mass atrocities in the region. This paper proposes the establishment of a network of parliamentarians to support atrocity prevention and promote the responsibility to protect (R2P) in Southeast Asia. The network will amplify various parliamentary roles to support atrocity prevention, including legislative action on atrocity prevention, sharing of best practices on the establishment of national mechanisms for atrocity prevention, and capacity building for parliamentarians in preventing mass atrocities from occurring in the future.