ASEAN to draft first constitution

ASEAN to draft first constitution

Michelle Nichols, Reuters/Kuala Lumpur

Southeast Asia's regional grouping agreed on Monday to draft its
first constitution, a document that could enshrine human rights
and democracy in a region where both have come under critical
scrutiny.

Leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN), including military-ruled Myanmar and communist
Vietnam, agreed an Eminent Persons Group including former
regional leaders should decide the final shape of a charter.

The declaration they signed made no mention of human rights or
democracy, but there are moves within ASEAN to write these into a
document which could be signed in 2007.

"We have not touched on anything just now, except to have an
administrative meeting," former Malaysian deputy premier Musa
Hitam, the Eminent Persons Group's chairman, told reporters in
Kuala Lumpur. "We identified our work program, that's all."

A charter could also create provisions for suspension or even
exclusion of member states which breached the constitution.

The lack of such a mechanism is often raised in public debate
on how ASEAN should deal with its most awkward member, Myanmar.

Myanmar has caused unease within the grouping since it joined
in 1997. The United States calls Myanmar an "outpost of tyranny"
and both Washington and the European Union (EU) have imposed
sanctions on the former Burma.

In 2003, Myanmar announced a "roadmap to democracy", a move
some ASEAN diplomats felt vindicated the group's policy of
constructive engagement.

But critics say the roadmap is a sham and point to the
continued detention of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose
National League for Democracy won a landslide election victory in
1990, only to be denied power by the army.

"It's going to be important because it's a first step towards
a creation of the charter," Indonesian spokesman Dino Patti
Djalal told reporters. "Obviously what is needed is the hard work
that will be done by the eminent persons," he said.

"These are the people who will draft the charter with the hope
that it will be finalized. That, we hope, will be something that
will strengthen ASEAN as one community, one vision and one
identity."

Malaysian political scientist P. Ramasamy said ASEAN as a
whole needed to do more on democracy. "There is only a difference
in degree between Myanmar and other ASEAN countries in terms of
the system," he said in the run-up to this week's ASEAN talks.

"Myanmar is the worst-case scenario, military junta. But in
Malaysia, Indonesia and others, the mere presence of elections
does not qualify these countries to be democratic in content."

A separate summit of ASEAN non-government groups said the
charter should embody "universal values" of regional religions
and cultures and ASEAN should set up a human rights commission.

It also called on ASEAN to strengthen its grouping of
lawmakers, the ASEAN Parliamentary Caucus, and transform it
eventually into a regional parliament.

But ASEAN leaders do not want to move toward a politically
integrated EU-style community, unwilling to yield on issues of
sovereignty in a region where overlapping sea claims have led to
gunboat diplomacy in recent years.

However, some leaders feel a charter is needed to help speed
economic integration, a goal frustrated at times by an informal
structure which, in the words of the ASEAN secretary-general,
allows leaders to sign an agreement and then "come back from
dinner and say you want to change".