Page 141 - The Ethics of ASEAN

CHAPTER
12

How ASEAN’s ethical future

could fail

he project for this book began with a conversation with Marzuki Darusman in
the summer of 2020 and I am writing the concluding chapters in the summer of
T2023. During those three years, many ethical challenges have arisen including the
Covid-19 pandemic but in general things have gone well for ASEAN.
Promising news came in the first half of 2023 with forecasts from the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that Southeast Asia is set
to be the world’s fastest growing region during 2023 and into 2024. A number of positive
development drivers are paying off: the “demographic dividend” of ASEAN’s young and
increasingly educated population, ASEAN’s growing role as a power in the global supply
chain, embrace of the digital economy and ASEAN trade agreements with the rest of the
world such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
What could possibly go wrong?
I will briefly discuss three ethics areas that are priorities for ASEAN where principles
must be backed up with action and mindsets of responsibility need to be supported for
all citizens. These three areas are freedom and human rights, human development and
sustainability.

Losing the ethics of freedom and human rights
Our ECAAR dialogue on freedom showed that ASEAN has considerably progressed in
rules-based ethics thanks to the 2009 establishment of an ASEAN Intergovernmental
Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) and the 2012 ASEAN Human Rights Declaration.
Writing in the Journal of Human Rights in 2021, Professor Anthony Langlois called it a
radical pivot. 1

1 “Human rights in Southeast Asia: ASEAN’s rights regime after its first decade” by Anthony J. Langlois, Journal
of Human Rights, Published 5 Apr 2021, retrieved 27 July 2023

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