Manushya Foundation submitted a report titled, “Defending the Defenders: Digital Repression and the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Southeast Asia”, in response to the call for input by the by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, to inform its report ‘Protection of Human Rights Defenders in the Digital Age’, pursuant to HRC resolution 58/23.

 

The submission provides a regional analysis of the structural threats faced by human rights defenders in digital spaces across Southeast Asia, including the weaponisation of cyber laws, online harassment, transnational digital repression, and the role of corporate actors in enabling surveillance and censorship.

 

–

​

The repression unfolding across our region is the system working as intended. The state and the corporations that own our digital infrastructure form a single apparatus that exists to defend a particular order: one in which a small owning class accumulates whilst the working masses are surveilled, criminalissed and dispossessed. 

​

We approach the protection of human rights defenders in the digital age from that understanding and we refuse to offer a pseudo-neutral account of a conflict that has clear sides. Human rights cannot be made conditional to the demands of capital, whether those demands arrive in the language of national security or the language of innovation.

​

Across Southeast Asia, the overreach of the state has always served the interests of capital and the political elites bound to it. The defenders in our submission were sued, doxxed, red-tagged and jailed. They were punished for exposing how power and wealth are held. We name them because the order they are confronted depends on their erasure.

​

The United Nations must abandon its deference to corporate self-regulation and the toothless voluntary frameworks that launder this system, including the useless Global Network Initiative and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. It must confront the material foundations of digital repression directly, beginning with international taxation that wrests power and resources from corporate monopolies and places the infrastructure of communication under democratic and public control. It must stop allowing its own flag to sanctify surveillance, and it must confront the imperial states that defend their tech corporations from redistribution while transnational capital extracts surplus from the labour, the data, and the natural wealth of the international working class.

​

None of this requires another voluntary framework or another working group. It requires the will to confront ownership and class power directly, a will our institutions have suppressed for so long that its absence now passes for the natural order of things. That order was built, which means it, too, can be dismantled.

File Size: 12.2 MB

Upload Date: 17 June 2026