Refugee protection norms and the fragmented refugee regime in Southeast Asia

From 2012 to 2015, the Southeast Asian region witnessed the worst refugee crisis in its history since the Vietnam war – the Rohingya crisis. The crisis was triggered by the exodus of the Muslim ethnic minority Rohingya from Myanmar and was exacerbated by Thailand’s crackdown on human trafficking rings. The Rohingya crisis presented an opportunity for the Southeast Asian region to develop its own refugee protection regime. However, despite the crisis, the region remains to have “the weakest normative refugee protection framework” in the world. Thus, this study aims to explain why the refugee regime in Southeast Asia remains underdeveloped. To achieve this end, the paper analyses the events that transpired, on a national and regional level, from 2012 to 2015 using Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink’s norm life cycle model. This paper argues that the refugee regime in Southeast Asia remains underdeveloped because Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) were able to preserve the status quo during the Rohingya crisis. The states were able to deal with domestic and international pressure through existing policies which resulted in the lack of motivation to adhere to refugee protection norms. At the same time, there was inadequate pressure for the states to adapt international refugee protection norms during the crisis. Meanwhile, on a regional level, the ASEAN was paralysed by the non-interference principle to directly address the crisis and at the same time, the involvement of human trafficking rings in the Rohingya crisis made it possible for the regional bloc to deal with the crisis in the anti-human trafficking dimension, instead of the refugee protection dimension. As long as the refugee regime in Southeast Asia remains underdeveloped, refugee protection will remain fragmented, which will continue to make the situation of refugees in the region precarious

Empowerment issues in Japan’s care industry: Narratives of Filipino nurses and care workers under the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) labour scheme

Japan has been accepting foreign nurses and care workers through an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam. For more than ten years of its implementation, the EPA framework with the Philippines has confronted tremendous political hurdles from conservative politicians, groups and non-state agents which oppose the free trans-border flow of health workers. The lack of holistic state support has affected the implementation of the labour scheme under the Philippine-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (PJEPA). In fact, majority of the nurses and care workers have failed the Japanese licensure examination, and an alarming percentage has decided to return to the Philippines after several years of training. Such trends indicate the failure of PJEPA to achieve a sustainable and mutually benefiting migration project. It is therefore imperative to examine the causes of this failure from the viewpoint of nursing and care delivery discourses. This paper contributes to the emerging literature that investigate EPAs and labour migration, with particular focus on the labour conditions and migrant decisions of individual care providers. Rethinking the concept of empowerment, we argue that the migration management regime, manifested in state’s healthcare policies and governance mechanism has been lacking meaningful support and guidance to the healthcare facilities, which translates to workers’ structural disempowerment. Nurses and care workers contest their dignity of labour, negotiate their experiences of deskilling, and seek strategies to survive the system. Disempowerment clearly impacts on individual migrant decisions, challenging established mechanisms and threatening the entire migration system to fail. © Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2020