Yuyun Wahyuningrum

August 2024 update: At the end of Yuyun Wahyuningrum’s second term as the Representative of Indonesia to the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), she started working as the Executive Director of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR).

Yuyun Wayhuningrum is also a PhD candidate at the International Institute for Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague of the Erasmus University. Her research deals with global-regional interaction of the human rights norms with specific focus on ASEAN as a site of contestation and the role of the participating actors.

While doing her Doctorate training at ISS, she co-founded and coordinated a network of PhDs from different universities in the Netherlands under SEA/ASEAN Research Forum. She was also a volunteer at the Stichting Mediators Beyond Borders International (MBBI), based in The Hague, Netherlands, helping the organisation in managing social media communication strategies.

She had been working as the Team Leader of Regional EU-ASEAN Dialogue Instrument on Human Rights Facility (READI HRF) to support ASEAN’s integration agenda for the period of August 2015 – January 2017, where she worked more closely with AICHR, the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and the Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC), the ASEAN Committee on Migrant Workers (ACMW) and the ASEAN Committee on Women (ACW) as well as the ASEAN Secretariat on various human rights projects.

She has spent more than twenty years working in different NGOs, which half of it was dedicated to engage with ASEAN’s advocacy, especially on the area of ASEAN Political-Security and Socio-Cultural Pillars. From 2009 to 2015 she worked with the Indonesian Representative to AICHR as the Senior Advisor on various issues including anti-torture, death penalty, migration, business and human rights and five-year work plans. She had been working closely with Country Representatives to the AICHR on different projects. In 2015, she was invited by the Philippines AICHR Representative to speak about improving human rights protection mandate and function. She was also the ACWC Consultant for the institutional strengthening project in 2014.

“Appreciation to the live we life-in, sense of social justice, respect differences, preference to empowerment approaches, are the things that have shaped my adult life. I have been here and there, but human rights will continue to be my focus of work and the good thing is I will never be alone, as wherever I go, I always find DTP alumna!”

At the moment, she is still serving as senior advisor to the Human Rights Working Group (HRWG), the Southeast Asian Initiatives for Human Rights Governance and Accountability (SIHRA), and Women Voices in ASEAN (WEAVE) on ad-hoc basis.

She established and moderates a list-serve calls [email protected], which its members have reached more than 2,000 email accounts from all over the world. Her writings appear in The Jakarta Post, NewsDesk Asia, Bangkok Post, The Nation, and Talking ASEAN of the Habibie Center. She holds a Master of Arts (MA) on Human Rights (2007) from Mahidol University in Thailand. She was selected as one of  the women experts at the #100womenwiki in Indonesia, specialising on regionalism, human rights and democracy and civil society in Southeast Asia, in the WomenUnlimited.

Yuyun visited UNSW in July 2018 as a special guest for a roundtable discussion on human rights in ASEAN 25 years after the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights. Report on the discussion can be found here.