Page 41 - The Ethics of ASEAN

A Model of ASEAN Ethics

Figure 6: Aung San Suu Kyi Figure 7: Jose Ramos-Horta Figure 8: Maria Ressa

the 2015 election, winning a landslide victory with 86% of the seats in the Assembly of the
Union. As State Councillor and leader of her party Suu Kyi won another landside victory
in the November 2020 Myanmar general election but was arrested on 1 February 2021
following a coup d’état by the Military junta and remains in prison at the writing of this
book.
The second is Jose Ramos-Horta, who was the exiled spokesman for the East Timorese
resistance during the years of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor (1975–1999) and
who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 along with fellow Timores Bishop Ximenes
Belo for their “sustained efforts to hinder the oppression of a small people”. He was elected
Timor Leste President in 2007 and was shot the following year in an assassination attempt
that nearly took his life. He continued to be active with the United Nations and the Global
Leadership Foundation and was re-elected as President of Timor Leste for a second time in
2022. His views on ethics are presented by himself Part Two of this book.
The third is the journalist Maria Ressa of the Philippines who won the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2021 jointly with Russian Dmitry Muratov for “their efforts to safeguard freedom
of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” Both winners
work in countries that are among the most dangerous for journalists. Ressa is co-founder
of the online news service Rappler and is a global advocate for freedom of speech and
freedom of the press and a leading analyst of fake news and distortions of truth in social
media. As an outspoken critic of human rights abuses by the Duterte government, Ressa
faced multiple court cases brought by the government that could have put her behind bars
for the rest of her life. She is the first ever Nobel laureate from the Philippines and has
participated in our ECAAR dialogue on freedom in Part 2 of this book.
Ethical leadership is not always about having followers or taking heroic action.
Leaders in everyday life have to be ethical: managers in companies, government
employees, teachers, parents, community workers. In a sense we are all leaders since we
lead ourselves. And of course, ethical leaders do not always agree on what is the right thing
to do. One of the challenges today for the ASEAN socio-cultural community is to promote
the education and networking of ASEAN’s ethical leadership as part of the mission of the
ASEAN Foundation, as we shall see in the chapter on ASEAN ethical leadership.

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