Centre for Applied Human Rights

She has worked for the University of the South Pacific for many years and has served in a number of positions including University Librarian, A/Director of Planning and Development, and Pro Vice-Chancellor. She has also worked in a number of regional outposts and has been attached for varying periods in libraries and organizations in Australia, Japan, United States, United Kingdom and Canada. In 2000, she spent one semester teaching at the International Women's University, University of Hamburg, Germany. Her work in libraries and information deals largely with ICT and she has recently been involved in research projects that include access to ICT by women for distance and flexible learning, ICT and challenges of information access in the Pacific, ICT and small and micro enterprises, and ICT and the curriculum. Esther is a keen sportsperson and has represented Fiji in squash in three South Pacific Games. She is a member of a number of committees including the PAN Asia ICT Research and Development Committee, ICT for Capacity Building at USP, Fiji Commerce Commission, and Fiji Audio Visual Commission.

Does legislation that grants land rights necessarily ensure justice? The Forest Rights Act of 2006 (FRA) in India, a landmark social justice law, aims to enhance land security for forest peoples. Increasingly displaced by development and extractive industries that intensify impoverishment, indigenous peoples in India should, with the FRA, be able to protect their land, their livelihoods and their culture. Continued government violations of forest land rights in the name of development highlight that economically vulnerable populations lack the power to take advantage of legislation. I examine the tension of current indigenous land struggles in the context of the legal frameworks of the FRA and the neoliberal culture of India.

Control of land is a source of contention among indigenous peoples, governments, conservationists and extractive industries.  Forests are crucial to the existence and survival of tribal and pastoralist populations in India. The competition for control of land, coupled with a historical lack of rights of indigenous peoples, has resulted in land dispossession and impoverishment. To address this, the Indian Government passed the Forest Rights Act in 2006. Using empirical evidence from India, I critically examine, from a socio-legal perspective, the challenges of implementing the Forest Rights Act. The Act itself, while pushing the new ‘inclusion’ paradigm within conservation thinking, has been a shock to bureaucratic structures in India such as the Forest Department, which sees its role as fighting the ‘encroachment’ of tribal communities, and whose attitudes towards the community ranges from apathetic to openly hostile. In violation of human rights, state and central governments are i...

In Country Frameworks for Development Displacement and Resettlement: Reducing Risk, Building Resilience, editors Susanna Price and Jane Singer bring together contributors to offer a deep exploration of evolving national frameworks that seek to mitigate the risk and deprivation faced by vulnerable communities displaced by the global competition for land. The chapters in this thought-provoking and comprehensive book carefully build a rigorous documentation of policies and legal practice to form a vital resource for academics, students and specialists working with land rights, writes Indrani Sigamany

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous - were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno-nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.

Social theorists examining the impact of globalisation on state power argue that sovereignty is being respatialised and rescaled and that it is no longer adequate to understand state sovereignty as operating evenly on a national scale over a population within a bounded territory. Nevertheless, ASEAN states continue to adopt such a national framing of people and place, particularly in the construction of immigration control regimes. I argue that in order to understand the localised and spatialised exercise of graduated sovereignty and the selective introduction of neoliberal practices, it is necessary to recognise the signifijicance of the immigration status of individuals and examine how the dividing practices of immigration control regimes permit the selective allocation of rights to non-citizens. This paper examines Malaysia's approach to international labour migration, noting that it makes diffferent biopolitical investments in diffferent types of noncitizens on the basis of a calculation of their potential contribution to the 'nation'. Malaysia creates a hierarchy of rights, giving greater rights to skilled workers, while restricting those of 'unskilled' workers. Malaysia punishes those who breach immigration laws severely. However, Malaysia's modernist approach to immigration control fails to achieve intended results and I highlight a number of reasons why.

This paper is based on a chapter submitted for a master's thesis to the National University of Singapore in 2004. I am grateful for the comments of two anonymous reviewers and Martin D. Jones, which were incorporated when revising this manuscript. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde (BKI) 164-2/3 (2008):212-237

In recent years, scholars have focused on the concept of healthcare deservingness, observing that healthcare professionals, state authorities and the broader public make moral judgements about which migrants are deserving of health care and which are not. Such literature tends to focus on migrants with irregular status. This article examines how state calculations of healthcare deservingness have also been applied to authorised migrants. Focusing on Malaysia, we examine the ways in which state authorities construct migrants as ‘desirable’, ‘acceptable’ and ‘disposable’, differentiated through calculations of their biological and economic risks and potential contribution to ‘the nation’. To do this, we analyse recent government and commercial policies, plans and practices to reflect on how such biopolitical orderings create the conditions for risk entrepreneurship – where public and private actors capitalise on profit-making opportunities that emerge from the construction of risky su...

Research on transnational advocacy networks has tended to focus on how non-state actors from developed countries interact with those from developing countries to pressure states, often by drawing in liberal Western states. This article adds a different perspective, focusing on how local civil society actors in different locales interact with each other to persuade their own governments Ôfrom belowÕ. It examines how these actors facilitate norm emergence amongst Asian states on issues with little domestic traction and for which there are well-developed international norms, standards and procedures. In studying the way local civil society actors conduct norm entrepreneurship, it is important to recognise the political, material and ideational conditions that constrain their work; their positionality and fragility in their own societies; and the way they relate to other actors working on the same issues. Focusing on the case of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network, it is argued that working through a formalised network has changed the ways and the conditions under which local civil society actors engage in norm entrepreneurship on refugee protection. It has changed the attributes of actors, helping them develop visibility, capacity and connectedness through the formation of a Ôcommunity of practiceÕ; it has changed power relations between them and other actors Ð in particular, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; it has facilitated the development of Ôregional imaginationÕ and the practice of Ôscale shiftingÕ, helping local actors move beyond domestic contexts to engage with state and non-state actors through regional and international fora. It has also introduced shifts in the dynamics of norm entrepreneurship by introducing a new actor Ð the network itself, which exercises agency through a Secretariat Ð and intra-network sensitivities, which need careful attention to prevent member disengagement.

In recent years, scholars have focused on the concept of healthcare deservingness, observing that healthcare professionals, state authorities and the broader public make moral judgements about which migrants are deserving of health care and which are not. Such literature tends to focus on migrants with irregular status. This article examines how state calculations of healthcare deservingness have also been applied to authorised migrants. Focusing on Malaysia, we examine the ways in which state authorities construct migrants as 'desirable', 'acceptable' and 'disposable', differentiated through calculations of their biological and economic risks and potential contribution to 'the nation'. To do this, we analyse recent government and commercial policies, plans and practices to reflect on how such biopolitical orderings create the conditions for risk entrepreneurshipwhere public and private actors capitalise on profit-making opportunities that emerge from the construction of risky subjects and risky scenarios while reinforcing hierarchies of healthcare deservingness that exacerbate health inequalities by privileging migrants with greater economic capital and legitimising the exclusion of poor migrants.

Recognizing indigenous identity in postcolonial malaysian law Rights and realities for the Orang Asli (aborigines) of Peninsular malaysia This paper is based on a chapter submitted for a master's thesis to the National University of Singapore in 2004. I am grateful for the comments of two anonymous reviewers and Martin D. Jones, which were incorporated when revising this manuscript.

Using an intersectional, contextually rooted approach, this important new book unites academic rigor with critical insights from the practice of extending protection to human rights defenders. The chapters use a variety of data-gathering and analytical methods to excavate the dynamics surrounding individual and collective protection in five countries. Tackling the hardest-and most important-protection issues, the book's diverse contributors interrogate ideas of security, risk and wellbeing. The result is a book that will make major contributions to the efficacy and strength of movements for justice". Margaret L. Satterthwaite, Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law, USA "There are extraordinary women and men around the world, from all sorts of occupations, willing to speak out against injustice, environmental depredation and discrimination. They stand up for others in frightening circumstances. If not attacked Protecting Human Rights Defenders at Risk This book assesses the construction, operation and effects of the international protection regime for human rights defenders, which has evolved significantly over the last two decades in response to the risks people face as they promote and protect human rights. Drawing upon the experiences of human rights defenders who continue to persevere in their activism in Indonesia, Egypt, Kenya, Mexico and Colombia, this edited collection examines the ways in which formal protection mechanisms by state and civil society actors intersect with self-protection measures and informal protection initiatives by families and friends. It highlights that protection practices are most effective when they are designed to address the specific risks that human rights defenders face (which are gendered and intersectional); reflect how defenders understand risk, security and protection; and are appropriate for the dynamic sociopolitical and legal contexts in which defenders operate. This book proposes ways in which the protection of human rights defenders at risk should be reimagined and practised. This book will be a thought-provoking guide for students and scholars of politics, international relations, law and human rights, as well as to practitioners engaged in the protection of human rights defenders at risk.