Introduction: The Curious Case of Right-Wing Human Rights Activism

When it comes to human rights struggles, a longstanding picture of ‘civil society vs the state’ emerged, with the former depicted as defenders and reformers and the latter as major transgressors and antagonists. Many have theoretically contested and empirically disproven the idea that civil society organisations (CSOs) are necessarily progressive, pluralist, and democratic, yet the assumption that CSOs are generally for liberal and progressive notions of human rights still lingers (Chambers and Kopstein Reference Chambers and Jeffrey2001; Eder Reference Eder2014; Weiss Reference Weiss and Case2015). As they are organisationally distinct and institutionally separated from political society, many assume that CSOs favour an expanded, protected, and autonomous civil space to maintain a competitive edge vis-à-vis the state and other pressure groups to advance their respective causes and interests.

This reading seeps into scholarly treatments of religious CSOs, too, even though their relationship with notions of universal human rights is complicated, if not contentious (Banchoff and Wuthnow Reference Banchoff and Wuthnow2011; Freeman Reference Freeman2004; Moosa Reference Moosa2001). For example, in his influential book, Casanova (Reference Casanova1994: 219) describes a public or deprivatised religion that operates at the level of civil society as “consistent with modern universalistic principles and with modern differentiated structures”. Robert Hefner's pathbreaking study of civil Islam in Indonesia marries the phenomenon with the broader democratisation agenda that heralded the collapse of the Suharto regime. He painted “civil Islam” as the majority's counterbalance to “statist Islam” through its commitment to values of “freedom, equality, and justice” (Hefner Reference Hefner2000: 218). However, developments in post-Suharto Indonesia that saw the persecution of gender and religious minorities (especially the Ahmadiyahs), entrenched moral policing laws, a contentious mobilisation campaign against a Christian mayor, and the empowerment of Muslim vigilante groups such as the Front Pembela Islam (FPI, Islamic Defenders’ Front) challenge the idea that civil society's expansion will necessarily boost the human rights agenda.Footnote ¹ This sense of disillusionment is compounded by the fact that numerous actors and agents associated with Hefner's civil Islam enabled many of these occurrences (van Bruinessen Reference Van Bruinessen2021).

The alarming developments in India, Myanmar, and Indonesia that saw the decline of religious freedom and minority rights following the mobilisation of right-wing religious actors reinforced a conceptual binary that divides non-western CSOs into two opposing camps (Ramakrishna Reference Ramakrishna2021). One camp rejects ‘Western’ interpretations of human rights as embedded in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), whereas the other generally accepts and champions it. Heuristically useful as it might be, this categorical distinction speaks very little about a new breed of right-wing CSOs who style themselves explicitly as human rights defenders. These CSOs are willing to work within the international human rights regime, but they also engage in a kind of ‘human rights’ activism that implicitly (and at times, openly) subverts, undercuts, and reformulates the agenda to move it away from a normative commitment to protect minority rights, social equality, and religious freedom. Specifically, this paper sheds light on the appropriation of ‘human rightism’Footnote ² by right-wing Islamist actors in Malaysia. The picture painted here complicates the idea that nativist political actors most scoffing at the ‘Western’ human rights regime will always position themselves as rejectionists and outsiders of the enterprise. Rather, what one witnesses is that the more these actors engage in the politics of human rights as fellow activists and putative insiders, the likelier they erode the parameters of what constitutes human rights and the notions of freedom and equality it affords.

Even though the protagonists of this study do not openly identify themselves as Islamists, their nativist positioning are inextricably linked to Islamist ideology, grievances, and networks. I will deal with the nativist and Islamist underpinnings of these actors in a later section. However, discussing the relationship between Islam and human rights is necessary. Scholars have long offered sophisticated treatments on the question of Islam's compatibility with the ideas of universal human rights and, more importantly, whether those are the only terms of debate for those seeking a radical vision of global justice and solidarity (Afshari Reference Afshari1994; Li Reference Li2020: 9–17; Mayer Reference Mayer1994; Moosa Reference Moosa2001). Those are not the grounds this paper wishes to tread. It does not debate whether human rights should be universal or particularistic, whether its values should be globalised or decolonised, or whether its historical praxis comprises good intentions or hypocrisies (Heinze Reference Heinze2011; Ishay Reference Ishay2004; Mutua Reference Mutua2016). Rather, my inquiry scrutinises a more practical concern: if we accept that discourses about human rights are inevitably subjected to pluralising pressures, what happens when two understandings of human rights coincide and contend in a Muslim-majority state? Do such contestations improve the lives and protections of the socially marginal and disadvantaged? In our case, what transpires is that a struggle portrayed as dismantling an allegedly hegemonic global Western human rights regime actually contributes to reinforcing local hegemonies based on a Muslim majoritarian worldview. In a world where the nation-state remains the perimeters in which dynamics of exclusion and inclusion (as well as protection and persecution) play out significantly, any local reproduction of majoritarian hegemonies in the name of human rights is undoubtedly a cause for concern (Weitz Reference Weitz2019).

Müller's account of “paradoxical normativities” in Brunei and Malaysia offers one way to visualise the encounter of contending visions of human rights (Müller Reference Müller2016). He underlines the paradox in how Muslim states Janus-facedly complied with the human rights regime by symbolically committing to a “transdoctrinal justification of human rights” on the diplomatic front and simultaneously enforcing an anti-pluralist brand of Islam on the governing front (ibid.: 416). My departure from Müller's approach is that I am less interested in documenting various forms of state hypocrisy and violations on human rights issues that journalists and groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) have meticulously accomplished. Instead, I argue that we must focus on how non-state actors who position themselves as active defenders of human rights capitalise on the liminal space these paradoxical normativities offer when they appropriate the human rights vocabulary and reframe it to justify exclusivist majoritarian social, political, and religious causes. These articulations are impactful reinventions of the human right discourse because they shed any moral commitment to protecting minorities and the socially marginalised altogether. As such, my account builds on similar observations scholars have made when examining right-wing politics in places such as Israel and Europe that saw a “sweeping acculturation of the universal human rights discourse” to legitimise the racist and chauvinistic agendas of actors whose ideological predecessors might have scorned such symbolic associations previously (Schneiker Reference Schneiker2019; Shor Reference Shor2008: 819). Whereas these studies focus on actors who adopt an anti-Muslim position, this paper's empirical contribution comes from examining those who advance a Muslim nativist and majoritarian agenda.

Right-wing non-state actors’ active appropriation of the human rights agenda deserves greater scholarly attention for three reasons. First, such appropriation sustains the appearance of compliance and cooperation in the eyes of external (Western) observers, rendering invisible the fact that these actors are working to undermine the human rights agenda significantly in issues concerning the protection of gender, sexual, racial, and religious minorities. Second, because they leverage through a nativist framing, these actors often enjoy the sympathy, if not the tacit support, of political and bureaucratic actors and agents who hold the levers of power in Malaysia's increasing Islamically-oriented ethnocratic regime (Liow Reference Liow2009; Mohamad Reference Mohamad2020; Wade Reference Wade2009). Due to a shared scepticism of human rights as a ‘Western’ conspiracy with other state actors, these right-wing activists’ lobbying efforts, unlike their liberal counterparts, can easily translate into concrete policy action (Bielefeldt Reference Bielefeldt1995: 592–593; cf. Freeman Reference Freeman1996; Ignatieff Reference Ignatieff2001). Contrary to their grievous positioning as underdogs having to contend with a ‘hegemonic’ and ‘foreign’ human rights regime, these right-wing CSOs work with power holders and brokers, not against them.Footnote ³

Third, despite the ‘human rights’ packaging, the positions held by these CSOs overlap with many social conservatives on morality, sexuality, and family values, enabling them to command a sizable local support. As we shall see, this aspect afforded these activists—many of whom are newcomers to the human rights scene—the social capital to leverage populist pressures to undermine other established local human rights agencies’ and activists’ legitimacy by labelling them as ‘pro-Western’, ‘liberal’, and even ‘treasonous’ on social media. By advancing a pro-majoritarian version of human rights, they inject ethnoreligious and exclusivist elements, not to mention potentially trans- and homophobic ideas, into local discourses about human rights. The result reshapes public expectations of the role of human rights defenders and overturns the axis of victimhood to portray the majority as the victim of an oppressive Western human rights regime.

In short, this paper examines the (contentious) co-sharing of the human rights rhetorical and institutional space where a globally situated, procedural-centric human rights regime came up against nativist self-proclaimed human rights entrepreneurs who infiltrated its mechanisms and reconfigured its norms while posing as cooperative local partners. It depicts a scenario where semantically recognising an overarching ideal of human rights protection does not necessarily safeguard it against normative and institutional erosion. It shows that CSOs can maintain the human rights façade while acting as cheerleaders of state policies that target, police, and discriminate against socially marginal groupings such as racial, gender, sexual, and religious minorities.

Methodology and Paper Structure

The empirical focus of this paper lies in two areas of interest. The first is the historical and social context in which Malaysia's right-wing ‘human rights’ activism arose. The second concerns the strategic novelties these right-wing actors introduced, which stood apart from right-wing Islamist actors’ more rejectionist and hostile treatment of the human rights agenda before the 2010s. It draws heavily from primary sources such as media writings, social media postings, interviews, reports, and publications. It uses a combination of actor tracing and discourse analysis to illustrate the phenomenon. The paper is structured as follows. The first section traces the development of a kind of human rights activism in Malaysia that involves two non-governmental organisations (NGOs): the Centre of Human Rights Research & Advocacy (CENTHRA) and the Malaysian Alliance of Civil Society Organisations in the UPR Process (MACSA) that emerged in the late-2010s.Footnote ⁴ I argue that these movements are distinctive in their explicit tactical and discursive focus on ‘human rights’. Unlike other Islamist movements, these Islamist NGOs steered clear of party (and partisan) politics. They spent considerable effort positioning themselves as legitimate stakeholders in Malaysia's human rights agenda, such as participating in the United Nations Human Rights Council's (HRC) Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and maintaining an active (social) media presence to argue for a more cultural relativist understanding of human rights. Despite their proclaimed ‘human rights’ niche, I argue that we must understand these groups’ activism within the networked effects of other right-wing Islamist affiliates that are also promoting an agenda of Muslim majoritarianism and Islamic cultural supremacy, even as each lobbied in different tones and on different fronts.

The second and third sections provide an account of the two main strategies employed by CENTHRA and MACSA, which I examine under the rubric of ‘getting in’ and ‘pushing out’, respectively. The former refers to how the two groups position themselves as key stakeholders of the Malaysian human rights agenda through vigorous participation in institutional processes and active appropriation of the human rights lexicon and iconography. The latter depicts an aggressive strategy of exposé, shaming, and critique of local human rights agencies and activists, particularly Malaysia's national human rights institution (NHRI), the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam), for pandering to ‘Western’ understandings of human rights. I argue that these activities aimed to erode the legitimacy of many established human rights actors in the eyes of Malaysians. At the same time, they hollow out the human rights agenda of its norms and commitments, especially concerning the protection of religious and sexual minorities. Through these empirically-grounded observations, this paper denotes how active participation in the human rights agenda on the procedural and rhetorical front does not necessarily entail its consolidation. Rather, the human rights regime in Malaysia appears particularly vulnerable to this two-pronged strategy that saw right-wing actors infiltrating to earn ‘insider’ credentials, on the one hand, and mobilising external pressures to drive the agenda towards majoritarian and chauvinist ends, on the other.

Setting the Scene: The Historical Context of Malaysia's Right-Wing Activism

Identifying what constitutes Malaysia's right-wing activism is challenging because communitarianism is central to the postcolonial nation's social, political, and cultural fabric (Crouch Reference Crouch1996: 152–176; Vasil Reference Vasil1980). The majority of Malaysia's mainstream political parties are race-based, with many defining memberships in explicitly racial terms.Footnote ⁵ For the first 60 years of the nation's history, a Malay-dominated consociational coalition, the Barisan Nasional (National Front, BN), led a government that carefully balanced communal interests with maintaining Malay-Muslim hegemony in both politico-economic and socio-cultural spheres (Wong Reference Wong2018). The idea of Ketuanan Melayu (Malay Overlordship) further legitimised this notion of Malay dominance under the stewardship of the Malay nationalist party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which several factors consolidated and institutionalised.Footnote ⁶ They include constitutional provisions that recognise the special positions of the Malays,Footnote ⁷ the political dominance of UMNO vis-à-vis the other component parties in BN (Case Reference Case1996), and the mainstreaming of Malay-preferential affirmative action aimed at reducing Sino-Malay inequalities in the 1970s. However, the latter has since morphed into a political economy that weaved together statist capitalism, clientelism, and a burgeoning Malay middle class (Gomez and Jomo Reference Gomez and Jomo1999; Menon Reference Menon2017; Sloane Reference Sloane1999).

Further complicating this picture is that the notion of Ketuanan Melayu has gradually taken on the rhetoric of Ketuanan Islam (Islam Supremacy) since the 1980s (Chin Reference Chin and Welsh2018).Footnote ⁸ Juxtaposed onto the idea of Malay political dominance is a line of Islamist reasoning that conflated a narrative of social justice for the Malays—who were seen as economically backward when compared to the Chinese—with an idea of cultural justice that demanded the public sphere be transformed and regulated based on Islamic understandings of public morality, halal consumption, and personal decency (Liow Reference Liow2009: 69, 191; Mohamad Reference Mohamad2010). One sees this transformation in the incremental implementation of socio-cultural policies that outlawed extramarital sex, alcohol, and non-heteronormative relationships among Muslims. Nonetheless, such effects bled into non-Muslim lives due to the co-sharing of public spaces, as the constantly bumbling discord about liquor sales control evinces (Tee Reference Tee2021). Nativist arguments supported these conservative yet authoritarian policy positions, with proponents claiming that Islamic values must permeate the social and political space because Islam was the original law of the land prior to the advent of colonialism. I call it nativism because it reflects Higham's classic definition that based it on an “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign…connections” (Higham Reference Higham2002: 4). This nativist streak in Malaysia's right-wing Islamism is most recently seen in campaigns such as the BMF (Buy Muslim First) movement launched in 2018, which co-opted Malay nationalist sentiments to function as an unstated boycott of non-Muslim-, or mainly ethnic Chinese-, produced goods (Zurairi Reference Zurairi2019).

Islam's increased saliency is arguably inexorable given the interlocking of the Malay identity with the religion and the fact that many interpret Malay/non-Malay divisions in Malaysia, though not always neatly, as a Muslim/non-Muslim partition.Footnote ⁹ The trend was also intensified by dynamics of top-down Islamisation as a result of UMNO's competition with its Islamist rival, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), on the one hand; and bottom-up Islamisation that was, following global patterns, advanced by Muslim dakwah (missionary) movements that peppered the urban landscape since the 1970s, on the other (Liow Reference Liow2009: 187–189). In short, a conservative ecosystem has long acclimatised Malay politics, especially after the demise of an inchoate leftist streak following (colonial) state oppression (Weiss Reference Weiss2020b). It is a form of conservatism that rewarded racially and increasingly religiously exclusivist discourses and policies that, in turn, reinforced racial categories and religio-cultural hierarchies. Historically, UMNO's pragmatic leadership circumscribed the parameters of such exclusivism. They were careful to not perturb Malaysia's multicultural peace, as it was conducive to the nation's political stability and economic growth (Kuhonta Reference Kuhonta2011: 80–117). Put differently, since the 1980s, a Malay-Muslim majoritarian ideology was increasingly institutionalised and normalised yet simultaneously curtailed by an authoritarian state that maintained the equilibrium.Footnote ¹⁰

If UMNO was the metaphorical lid to these majoritarian forces, its dwindling political strength political strength after the 2008 elections, and even more so after the BN's historic defeat in the 2018 General Elections, saw right-wing majoritarian activism take off via numerous Malay non-governmental organisations (NGOs).Footnote ¹¹ Right-wing populist groups such as the Malay nationalist Pertubuhan Pribumi Perkasa Malaysia (PERKASA, Malaysian Indigenous Empowerment Organisation) and the Islamist Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (ISMA, Malaysian Muslim Solidarity) painted UMNO's demise as a result of non-Malays and non-Muslims colluding to overturn the long-established Malay political order.Footnote ¹² Their messaging often signalled the Malaysian Chinese as the main culprit. We may consider these groups populist, as their activism frames their struggle as ‘elite vs masses’. However, their underlying worldview is nativist, wherein corrupted Malay elites have forsaken the indigenous Malay masses by selling out to Chinese interests whom they see as pendatangs (immigrants/outsiders).Footnote ¹³ This penchant for populist politics is why social media is so central to their strategies. The platform's aggregating strength allows these right-wing groups to mobilise populist opinion against minority-friendly groups and agendas they oppose, as we shall see later.

I categorise these groups as ‘right-wing’ because they shift a conservative Malay-Muslim nationalist discourse to extreme positions. These groups did so via fiery rhetoric, such as PERKASA's threat to burn Bibles (Today Online 2014); advocating for an extra-parliamentary rule, such as ISMA's proposal for “semi-democratic” rule to preserve Malay-Muslim hegemony (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020);Footnote ¹⁴ and championing a form of racial exclusivism to replace the old model of Malay-dominated consociationalism with a Malay-Muslim-only government. ISMA, in particular, has spearheaded aggressive online campaigns and electoral strategies to dislodge non-Malay parties from the ruling coalitions of the BN and, later, the Perikatan Nasional (National Alliance, PN).Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, it is telling that a party with strong connections to connections to ISMA, Berjasa (the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Front), have joined a coalition called Gerakan Tanah Air (Homeland Movement – GTA), which fielded no non-Muslim candidates in the 2022 General Elections (Cheema Reference Cheema2022). Long-time observers will not find ISMA's total political exclusion of non-Muslims surprising, given that it has been their long-term goal (Ahmad Fauzi and Che Hamdan Reference Abdul Hamid, Che Mohd Razali, Orofino and Allchorn2023). What is more concerning is the gradual mainstreaming of these views. In the 2022 General Elections, PN, which won the second highest number of parliamentary seats, fielded a paltry number of non-Malay and non-Muslim candidates, far fewer when compared to the UMNO-dominated BN. This trajectory of mainstreaming Malay-Muslim majoritarianism appears to mimic that of the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, which currently has no Muslim representation in parliament and does not seem to care about changing the situation as they continued to field a negligible amount of Muslim candidates in elections and propagate an exclusivist rhetoric that clearly targeted the Muslim population (Bhatnagar Reference Bhatnagar2022).

Complicating efforts to call out these actors extreme right-wing positions is their mainstream social existence. Even though academic writings have addressed them as worrying trends, these actors were rarely subjected them to the social stigma that befell far-right groups in the West (Harteveld et al. Reference Harteveld, Dahlberg, Kokkonen and van der Brug2019). For example, they could still meet or share platforms with ministers and senior civil servants, hold columns in mainstream newspapers, and join umbrella organisations with other more moderate Malay-Muslim CSOs with little to no pushback.Footnote ¹⁶ This situation is appalling if one considers that, according to Mudde's definition, we should regard these groups as the “far right” due to their hostility to liberal democracy characterised by extreme exclusivist attitudes towards minorities, including calling them “invaders” at one point (Mudde Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2019: 15; Zahiid Reference Zahiid2014). Nevertheless, calling out their ideological positions is fraught with risks, especially if the messenger is based in Malaysia. An academic who called ISMA ‘extreme right-wing’ in an article saw it withdrawn from its Singapore-based platform after one of the individuals named in the article threatened a lawsuit (Tayeb Reference Tayeb2022). The social acceptance of what may look to many as discriminatory, if not extreme, positions further insulate some of these actors from critique, enabling them to infiltrate a traditionally ‘liberal’ domain such as human rights.

Majoritarianism as Human Rights: The Centring of Human Rights in Malaysia's Right-Wing Islamist Activism

The emergence of right-wing NGOs that position themselves as human rights organisations is connected to the developments above. The gradual weakening of UMNO that resulted in its ouster from government in 2018 and the pervasiveness of what Hew calls “liquid Islamism” emerging from the overlapping between pious, urbane Muslim middle-class aspirations and an increasingly Syariah-minded political consciousness resulted in the mushrooming of numerous Muslim pressure groups in areas ranging from consumerist interests to women's issues (Hew Reference Hew, Hansson and Weiss2017). As a social movement, these Muslim NGOs are comprised of urban middle-class activists seeking to actualise their ideas of Islamic rule in Malaysia through non-electoral means, such as ideas propagation, public pressuring, and stakeholder lobbying. Due to their conservative outlooks, they tend to differ, and at times clash, with the more progressive NGOs on issues of sexual morality, censorship, religious freedom, and social inequalities in Malaysia (Lim Reference Lim2013; Ahmad Fauzi and Che Mohd Razali Reference Abdul Hamid and Che Mohd Razali2016: 7–10).

To be sure, Malay-Muslim groups also inhabit the progressive parts of Malaysia's NGO ecosystem, as in the cases of the Sisters In Islam (SIS), the Islamic Renaissance Front (IRF), and Komuniti Muslim Universal Malaysia (KMU). Their efforts to advance a more humanistic and feminist reinterpretation of Islamic orthodoxies inform their activism (Basaruddin Reference Basaruddin2016; Rahim Reference Rahim, Esposito, Rahim and Ghobadzadeh2018: 197–98). However, by virtue of their professed Malay-Muslim identity, the state and religious establishment significantly censured and ostracised these groups. For example, SIS was labelled ‘deviant’ in a fatwa (religious edict); IRF's book was banned; and KMU activists were doxed and harassed, forcing some to seek temporary asylum abroad (KMU et al. 2021: 5; Mohamad Reference Mohamad2020: 141; Yatim Reference Yatim2019). The harsh treatment of these liberal Muslim NGOs, often cheered on by their right-wing counterparts, shows how the contestation of norms and rights has expanded from a ‘state-CSOs’ axis to a ‘culture war’ between the CSOs (Awang Reference Awang2019). Tamir Moustafa's work traces this ‘war’ back to a “rights-versus-rites” binary that saw controversial court cases manufactured into public spectacles that, in turn, drew public opinion and competing activists into skirmishes that sought to settle the question of Malaysia's secular/Islamic identity in a zero-sum and high-stakes manner (Moustafa Reference Moustafa2018: 6).

These battles’ increased stakes eventually leaked into the UPR process, in which Malaysia has participated since 2008. To summarise briefly, the UPR is a process that enables the HRC to review the human rights record of a country every five years. The process involves assessing reports from governments, independent experts, and national stakeholders such as NHRIs and NGOs. After the review, states receive recommendations to improve their human rights condition, which they can accept or simply note. The UPR initially attracted many NGOs from the liberal end of the value spectrum, who organised themselves as the Coalition of Malaysian NGOs in the UPR Process (COMANGO). However, by its third round of review in 2018, the participants had diversified, with groups such as CENTHRA and MACSA emerging as a conservative Islamist bloc.

CENTHRA and MACSA arose as the successor to a coalition of Muslim NGOs, MuslimUPRo (Muslim NGOs in the UPR Process), that came into the scene during Malaysia's second UPR in 2013. MuslimUPRo argued that the Malaysian government's proposals in response to the UPR process must be “properly based on Syariah laws and the Federal Constitution” (Human Rights in ASEAN 2013a). When compared to its successors, MuslimUPRo was more confrontational and disagreeable. In 2013, it attacked COMANGO as foreign-funded and successfully pushed for it to be banned (Kamal Reference Kamal2014; Zurairi Reference Zurairi2013). They also polemically claimed that “unqualified persons” represented Muslim-majority nations while drafting international human rights conventions (Human Rights in ASEAN 2013c). Nonetheless, they had dropped these aggressive stances by the time of CENTHRA's and MACSA's establishment. They even obscured the Muslim aspect of their identities by eliminating the term ‘Muslim’ from their names.

At this point, a brief introduction of the two groups is due. Azril Mohd Amin, who once headed MuslimUPRo, founded CENTHRA in 2014. It calls itself a research and advocacy organisation that

Nonetheless, the true successor to MuslimUPRo is MACSA, established in 2018. It claims to represent 52 NGOs (including CENTHRA), with most, if not all, being Muslim NGOs. Many of these NGOs were involved in MuslimUPRo, including the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM) and ISMA.Footnote ¹⁸ Co-chaired by Azril Mohd Amin and a University Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) lecturer in physiology, Rafidah Hanim Mokhtar (henceforth: Dr Rafidah), during its founding, MACSA also proclaimed strengthening human rights as its agenda, although it was couched in an Islamist- and nativist-inflected language (something I will return to below).

We can understand the entry of MuslimUPro, and later CENTHRA and MACSA, into the human rights scene in Malaysia as an act to counterbalance the perceived preponderance of liberal CSOs, such as Suhakam and the various groups within COMANGO in the UPR process. Yet, unlike many Islamist actors who viewed human rights as an outright Western import not worth engaging in, CENTHRA and MACSA have fronted human rights activism as their raison d'etre. They call themselves ‘human rights defenders’ explicitly and have positioned themselves as informed stakeholders who should be consulted in the UPR process. They have done so by meeting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss the UPR, submitting a stakeholders’ report to the HRC for review, celebrating International Human Rights Day on their social media page, and even sending delegates to participate in the UPR process as observers in Geneva.

‘Getting In’: Gaining Legitimacy as a ‘Human Rights Defender’

Despite their efforts to reformulate and resist what they see as ‘foreign’ human rights norms, actors from MACSA and CENTHRA actively position themselves as ‘insiders’ to the cause. Their nativist positions notwithstanding, these groups often resort to English (instead of the national language of Malay) as their primary medium of communication. This strategy dovetails with the fact that English remains the working language for human rights advocacy in Malaysia and internationally. Echoing Generation Identity's appropriation of symbols associated with Amnesty International (Schneiker Reference Schneiker2019: 160), MACSA's full name, the Malaysian Alliance of Civil Society Organisations in the UPR Process, bears a striking resemblance to COMANGO's (The Coalition of Malaysian NGOs in the UPR process). Notably, both use a similar blue hue in their logos. Most tellingly, when COMANGO raised concerns about MACSA having an almost identical name yet adopting abjectly contradictory stands on issues of “female genital mutilation (FGM) or cutting, whipping, polygamy, and women's and girls’ unequal inheritance” (COMANGO 2018: 1–2), MACSA fired back at COMANGO for their “unprovoked, malicious attacks on their fellow human rights defenders (emphasis added)”.Footnote ⁴¹

This effort to build ‘insider credentials’ as a human rights defender benefitted from MACSA's active participation in the UPR process, such as submitting their stakeholders’ report and sending a delegate to the UPR sessions in Geneva. The group also provided training for those wishing to participate in future UPR processes, a move aimed at breaking the hold of liberal human rights actors on these mechanisms. This newfound proclivity towards technocratic activism that departs from the kind of protest and mobilisational politics in MuslimUPRo days helps sharpen MACSA's image as a civil and legitimate stakeholder within the human rights agenda. Despite their synergistic origins and alignment in ideological positions, MACSA's leaders have softly distanced themselves from ultra-conservative groups such as ISMA to focus on their human rights activism. Footnote ⁴² This decision, in turn, enhances MACSA's appeal to the (upper) middle-class Malay-Muslim bourgeoisie that prefers a more intellectual outlook in one's activism (Abaza Reference Abaza1999).

This strategy of ‘getting in’ appears to be astonishingly successful given that, despite being a newcomer to the scene, MACSA was one of the few ‘human rights bodies the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) consulted in 2018 when formulating a new foreign policy framework (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2019: Annex 3). MOFA cemented their legitimacy as ‘human rights defenders’ by engaging MACSA as the putative Islamic bloc alongside other human rights stakeholders such as Suhakam and COMANGO during the UPR process in 2018. Astoundingly, this event happened during PH's administration (2018–2019). Logically, PH should have been less friendly to actors with putative ties to right-wing Muslim NGOs like ISMA, as they led a vehement oppositional campaign against the PH government they deemed anti-Malay and anti-Islam (Hew Reference Hew2020a). Interestingly, media reports had labelled MACSA as “human rights defenders”, even as one journalist acknowledged COMANGO's and MACSA's clashing interpretations of human rights, not to mention the latter's smear campaign against the former a few years earlier (Zurairi Reference Zurairi2018). By 2021, MACSA and CENTHRA gained column spaces in Malay and English mainstream newspapers, such as New Straits Times, Berita Harian, and Utusan Malaysia, where their activists frequently wrote about human rights issues (Amin Reference Amin2021; Meor Mazli Reference Meor Mazli2021; Mokhtar Reference Mokhtar2021a).

Nevertheless, successfully ‘getting in’ was not unexpected, as MACSA activists already enjoyed considerable ‘insider’ access. For a start, the group's conservative Islamist take on human rights issues has always enjoyed some degree of sympathy and support from many within Malaysia's civil service, particularly the Islamic bureaucracy. The Federal Department of Islamic Development of Malaysia (JAKIM) has collaborated with various Islamist NGOs, including ISMA, to counter ‘liberal’ causes in Malaysia (Mohamad Reference Mohamad2020: 144–145). The Majlis Agama Islam Wilayah Persekutuan (the Islamic Council of the Federal Territories, MAIWP) reportedly sponsored MACSA's delegation to Geneva.Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, Azril Mohd Amin, the head of CENTHRA, was a special officer to Malaysia's 8^th Prime Minister, Muhyiddin Yassin (2020–2021), giving him insider access due to the “social and Islamic affairs” clusters he oversaw (Solhi Reference Solhi2021). After Muhyiddin's resignation, Azril was appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Institute Masa Depan Malaysia (MASA), a think tank linked to Muhyiddin's party, the Malaysian United Indigenous Party (Bersatu) (Berita Harian 2018).Footnote ⁴⁴ Dr Rafidah, on the other hand, is a public university professor who, as of this writing, serves as a member of the Women's Council of the Yayasan Dakwah Islamiah Malaysia (Islamic Dakwah Foundation of Malaysia, YADIM)–a state-funded body coordinating the dakwah activities of Muslim NGOs.Footnote ⁴⁵ She is also the President of The International Women's Alliance for Family Institution and Quality Education (WAFIQ)—also part of MACSA—working with the religious authorities in Malaysia in their Mukhayyam programmes that claim to serve those who have ‘repented’ from their LGBT lifestyles.Footnote ⁴⁶ Put differently, despite their polemics that ‘human rights’ is merely a playground for the liberal detached elites, the prime movers of this conservative, nativist, and Islamist version of human rights activism in Malaysia are very much a part of the upper social classes too.

‘Pushing Out’: Networked Assault on Suhakam and Human Rights Activists

CENTHRA's and MACSA's strategy of positioning themselves as competent human rights insiders also generated substantial pressure for many established human rights organisations, such as COMANGO and Suhakam. Acting as dedicated ‘human rights’ observers, these groups often resorted to critiques and exposés to push ‘liberal’ human rights organisations into public attention to invite state intervention or public backlash. I have already discussed efforts to get COMANGO banned in the early 2010s above. Recently, these groups have directed efforts of ‘pushing out’ at Suhakam, admittedly the most important party to Malaysia's UPR processes, given its status as the NHRI.

At this point, it is worth briefly surveying Suhakam's role, which has been a matter of fierce debate. Established in 2000 under the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia Act 1999, Suhakam is a statutory body that enjoys an international mandate established by the Paris Principles, which guarantees it “some measure of financial, personal, and institutional autonomy from the government” (Thio Reference Thio2009: 1276). In practice, however, Suhakam is still dependent on state funding and appointments (such as the appointment of its commissioners) and plays more of an advisory and educational role in mediating between international norms and local contexts to advance human rights agendas (ibid.: 1299–1300; Whiting Reference Whiting2003: 73). By having an investigative mandate that allows the agency to examine and report on allegations of human rights abuse (even though it cannot enforce laws), Suhakam often finds itself in an unenviable position where human rights NGOs accuse it as being “toothless” and the government sees it as a nuisance (Thio Reference Thio2009: 1334–37). A fair assessment of Suhakam would be that it helps with the “popularization of human rights” (ibid.: 1305), even if the agency maintains strict ‘no-go’ zones on issues of race and religion, directly contradicting the Paris Principles’ special emphasis on combatting racial discrimination.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even as Suhakam's silence on many racial and religious discrimination issues exasperated critics, human rights NGOs have thus far been able to count on Suhakam as a distant ally to uphold human rights standards that are, at least nominally, anti-authoritarian and committed to protecting minority rights. However, that could change as right-wing ‘human rights’ activists have astutely targeted Suhakam itself as a site for contention, infiltration, and subversion.

Although it has maintained a working relationship with Suhakam on selected issues such as child rights and the Convention against Torture (CAT),Footnote ⁴⁸ MACSA has resolutely disagreed with Suhakam on topics such as abolishing the death penalty and Sedition Act, child marriage, and tackling discrimination towards ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities. Concerning these issues, MACSA hewed to the position of the conservative pro-Malay, pro-orthodox Islam establishment, whereas Suhakam took more progressive positions.Footnote ⁴⁹ As noted above, MACSA's vision of empowerment for the Orang Asli aspires to assimilate them as Muslims, whereas Suhakam has criticised covert efforts to convert the Orang Asli (Thio Reference Thio2009: 1323–24). MACSA couched its disagreement with Suhakam in cultural relativist arguments. It accused Suhakam's positions as primarily based on the UDHR and not the CDHRI and AHRD that better reflected the region's and Malaysia's religio-cultural context (Amin Reference Amin2018). Because the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia Act 1999 did not include the two declarations, MACSA also pushed for its amendment, demonstrating its appetite for institutional reforms that went beyond the aggressive protest politics of the past (Alias and Mokhtar Reference Alias and Mokhtar2019).

In any case, any sign of collegial disagreement between Suhakam and MACSA all but disappeared when news about the agency researching the ‘Feasibility of Having Legislation of the Recognition of a Third Gender in Malaysia’ leaked in June 2021. Accusing the agency of being against “all faiths” in an English-language article, Dr Rafidah lambasted it for having “exposed their own lack of independence and blind deference to whatever external pressures that are being wielded upon them to promote this immoral agenda” (Mokhtar Reference Mokhtar2021a). In another Malay-language article, she argued that, for Muslims, secular principles of human rights were not harmonious with religion and especially singled out the Muslim commissioners for “adhering to the Paris Principles rigidly” to the extent they went against Islamic teachings and the Constitution (Mokhtar Reference Mokhtar2021b).Footnote ⁵⁰

This line of critique, and worse, its backsliding to ad hominem attacks, was taken up by ISMA and later the Pertubuhan-Pertubuhan Pembela Islam (the coalition of Muslim defenders, Pembela), then headed by a former President of ISMA (2018–2021), Aminuddin Yahaya (henceforth: Aminuddin).Footnote ⁵¹ On one of the Facebook pages that ISMA managed, a posted image contained the faces of Suhakam's commissioners under the title “those responsible for the maliciousness of Suhakam” (see Figure 1). The post called out Suhakam for its five ‘sins’: (i) striving to recognise the third gender; (ii) legalising prostitution; (iii) pushing the government to provide special facilities to the transgender community; (iv) normalising the idea of non-binary gender by including it in their report, and (v) opposing the criminalisation of Muslim apostasy in Malaysia. Three days later, a MACSA Facebook post again featured the nine Suhakam commissioners with their photos displayed alongside a message protesting Suhakam for allegedly trying to recognise a third gender (see Figure 2). Aminuddin went further by listing the names of the four Muslim commissioners and rhetorically asking, “What were their functions in the agency, if not to protect Islam”?Footnote ⁵² One of the commissioners, Professor Nik Salida, an Islamic law lecturer, was also singled out. Figure 3 shows an image posted on Facebook where her face, paired with a purported statement of hers claiming “all gender identities and sexual orientation should not be discriminated”, was laid next to the then Minister of Islamic Affairs’ claim that “Malaysia rejects LGBT and will not recognise the third gender”.

Figure 1.

GPS's ‘exposé’ of the Suhakam CommissionersFootnote ⁵⁵

Figure 2.

The Image Accompanying MACSA's Protest of Suhakam's Research on a Third GenderFootnote ⁵⁶

Figure 3.

GPS's Attack on Nik Salida, a commissioner of SuhakamFootnote ⁵⁹

‘Outing’ the Muslim commissioners in this way helped polemicise the issue through the lens of religious identity. Soon, netizens left comments claiming that the problem with Suhakam was that the majority of the commissioners were non-Muslims (even though all Suhakam chairpersons have historically been Muslims). Aminuddin also called for action against Suhakam, including changing the line-up of its commissioner to include more Islamic scholars (the ulamas).Footnote ⁵³ Doxxing attacks also befell a Suhakam staff member whose face was appended on articles that called him out for saying that state-enacted Syariah laws can be criticised because they are ultimately “man-made”.Footnote ⁵⁴

These naming and shaming tactics were effective because they exploited Suhakam's precarity and exposure to state manipulation on the one hand and populist anger on the other. Notwithstanding its stature as Malaysia's NHRI that comes with certain safeguards of institutional autonomy, the government often subjects Suhakam to its pressure and influence. For example, in 2016, Suhakam had to endure a 50 per cent funding cut from the Najib administration that had proclaimed “human rightism” as its enemy (The Edge 2015; Müller Reference Müller2016: 435). Even the elected PH government that was more amenable to the human rights agenda had continued the opaque practice of appointing Suhakam commissioners without any parliamentary oversight (Free Malaysia Today 2019). Suhakam's porosity to state intervention renders it more vulnerable to media campaigns and institutional capture mounted by conservative and right-wing elements. Moreover, significant quarters within the state—whether politicians, academics, or civil servants—have long considered the agency too pro-Western and anti-Islam. Such scepticism of the human rights agenda is evident in a paper co-authored by the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Home Affairs that counts “fanatical human rights groups” as one form of “violent extremism” (Abdul Aziz et al. Reference Aziz, Dahlan, Abdullah, Said and Zahari2021: 1). Thus, ‘pushing out’ the commissioners who owed their (re)appointment to a government that contained an Islamist partnerFootnote ⁵⁷ achieved two motives: (i) exposing the commissioners to public shaming, and (ii) shoring up public expectations for the appointment of more ‘Islamically-compliant’ commissioners in the future.

Without the state showing support or making any guarantees of protection, these pressure and intimidation tactics, even if mainly on social media, appeared to have worked.Footnote ⁵⁸ On 15 December 2021, to the shock of many human rights activists, Suhakam released a statement clarifying its stance on religious rights and the LGBT issue, conceding vaguely to the Islamists’ and cultural relativists’ positions. For example, the statement asserts that enactments against Muslim apostasy are legitimate in Malaysia under state-level Syariah laws, contravening Suhakam's longstanding position on religious freedom. The statement also claims that, even as the Federal Constitution guarantees fundamental rights for the LGBT community, such rights…

Additionally, Suhakam's commissioner line-up has tilted towards the conservatives. The new chairperson appointed in mid-2022 has argued against Malaysia joining the Rome Statute and ICERD. One of the new commissioners was a former director-general of JAKIM, an agency that often butted heads with human rights NGOs because it accused the agenda of being anti-Islam (CSO Platform for Reforms 2022). It would appear that in return for their activism to push out the more ‘liberal’ commissioners, right-wing Islamists were rewarded with appointments more sympathetic to their conservative Islamist cause.

Given the aggressive lobbying and personal attacks, it is difficult to take this concession as simply an outcome of civil debate between particularistic and universalist proponents of human rights, which the normative literature on human rights tends to assume. The tussle was hardly ever framed in theoretical or philosophical terms, nor did one treat the other as a worthy, equal dialogue partner. Suhakam's precarious position as an NHRI holding relatively liberal positions within a conservative Malay ethno-nationalist regime that included an Islamist governing partner (2020–2022) rendered it almost defenceless in the face of these attacks, more so when the political parties in the opposition were hesitant to support the agency for fear of a conservative backlash. The harnessing of social media's galvanising potential also helped these right-wing actors penetrate the insular and bureaucratic world Suhakam usually operates in, forcing the agency and its leadership out of their comfort zone to face semblances of majoritarian pressure as these right-wing activists claimed to be speaking for the ‘silent’ conservative Malay-Muslim majority. They mounted these networked and seemingly coordinated attacks against Suhakam across multiple platforms (e.g., mainstream newspaper articles, pseudo-news portals, social media, and petitions), creating a wave of (largely online) populist anger Suhakam alone seemed ill-equipped to respond. Most notably, these interlocutors kept questioning Suhakam's legitimacy in representing the interest of the majority Malay-Muslim community as a state-funded body, blithely dismissing Suhakam's mandate as human rights agency and not a communitarian one.Footnote ⁶¹