ASEAN nations establish regional economic community

ASEAN can be proud that it has been able to maintain great ambitions for all these three pillars, PM Najib told the summit.

“The perpetrators…do not represent any race, religion or creed”. For it is not Islamic.

In addition, he said that Asean countries needed good intelligence exchange networks that could provide accurate information and rapid response to possible terrorist attacks and its locations.

ASEAN, founded in 1967, consists of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.

He said he stressed the importance of peace and stability in the region during the conference.

It aims to create a community that is “politically cohesive, economically integrated, and socially responsible”.

The challenge of this association of nations, marked by diversity, can be seen in the words of Najib while inaugurating the summit the day before, when he asked: How do we make the ASEAN something that touches the daily lives of our people, how do we make our citizens feel, directly, that the chances of the Community we will establish are their own? It is only the beginning and remains a work in progress.

“It is important that the scope and content of ACFTA continue to grow in line with the current regional and global economic landscape and are comparable to other modern free trade agreements”.

The China-ASEAN meeting came as the ASEAN community, the first sub-regional community in Asia, is expected to take shape by the end of this year, which Li hailed as “a milestone in regional integration”. “But once you enter… you may have to grease the palms of a few people in certain ASEAN countries to proceed”. In fact, it is still the only regional economic integration process under way in Asia.

Both the declarations were endorsed by the ASEAN leaders in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, among others. The Chinese premier also asked the two sides to promote the sustainable development of the region by promoting maritime cooperation, strengthening agricultural capacity construction, building a platform for sharing information on environmental protection, and deepening people-to-people exchanges, Xinhua reported.

ASEAN’s relationship with China is highly complex and ambivalent.

Meanwhile Wathshlah Naidu of Women’s Aid Organisation Malaysia (WAO) said the human rights agenda of Asean in the Asean Community Vision 2025 was “rather fragmented and established in silos”.

Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung was among the ASEAN leaders at the gathering, which also included the representatives of the group’s dialogue partners, including China, South Korea, Japan, India, New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Russian Federation.

Two-way trade between China and ASEAN has grown almost 50 times from US$8 billion in 1991 to more than US$370 billion now.