Abstract
The development of a regional human-rights commission in Southeast Asia constitutes a fresh battleground where competing views are playing out. As in the past the main interlocutors on the side of cultural relativism are Singaporean leaders and officials, but this time, opposing voices within Southeast Asia have grown louder and more self-confident. Singapore's leaders continue to spend more energy challenging or dismissing the universality of human rights than identifying and seeking to protect culturally and historically specific versions of those rights. This is because of the ruling People's Action Party's rejection of concepts of citizenship rights that are threatening to an acutely elitist authoritarianism and the restrictive nature and basis of political accountability that define the regime. Nevertheless, the Asian Inter-Governmental Commission on Human Rights has necessitated the domestic institutionalization of civil society consultation on human rights that hitherto didn't exist in the city state.