Last Update: Monday, November 30, 2009

News Archive - Events

Back

Title:    Consultation on ASEAN Charter and AICHR
Posting Date: 10/12/2009 4:11:34 AM

Consultation on ASEAN Charter and AICHR

Phnom Penh, Cambodia- 29th September-2009, a one-day consultation on ASEAN Charter and AICHR (ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights) held at Goldiana Hotel by Star Kampuchea and SEACA. The workshop aims to familiarize participants on updates on the ASEAN, particularly on the ASEAN Charter, Community Blueprints, and the ASEAN Commission on Human Rights and to discuss strategies and plans on Cambodian civil society engagement of different ASEAN bodies at the national and regional levels with 25 participants from INGOs and LNGOs in Phnom Penh and others 9 provincial NGOs networks.

Cambodia’s membership in ASEAN has both negatives and positives. The negative is all embassies of ASEAN countries and plus one secretariat in ASEAN Secretariat, spending a lot on meeting, sharing equal cost of ASEAN operation and other preparation and set up institutions. The benefit has two ways economic: trade, investment and tourism, economic development and reform and HRD and political benefit, ending isolation, confident building, security cooperation TAC (Treaty of Amity and Cooperation) and other benefit such as cultural exchange and disaster managements. Refers to its ToR, AICHR is a consultative body of ASEAN, only few countries play import role in improving human rights and political systems (Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand), CLMV (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam) always oppose to the ideas of AICHR, countries such as Singapore or Brunei are neither oppose nor agree on the ideas and ToR of AICHR has no reporting procedure and peer review on human rights issues.

Cambodian NGOs raising the issues for ASEAN to consider and to take action at both national and regional levels on quality of product in ASEAN member’s state, local and regional Market for ASEAN member’s sate, increase production to compete with other regions, nationalism and culturalizm of ASEAN member’s state, cultural exchange among ASEAN’s member states, set up formal dialogue mechanism both at national and regional level for Civil and government to exchange ideas and concerns with specific issues, rights of indigenous people in the ASEAN member states have been violated, the government in each states should take care of the issues and ASEAN should be able to address the issues of human right abuse among its members.

 

 Back