Page 43 - The Ethics of ASEAN

CHAPTER
3

Building ASEAN’s Ethical

Dialogue

SEAN ethics is a work in progress. The development story starts from the early
aspirations of the Association of Southeast Asia to create a region of brotherhood
Aand human development, leading to the creation of an institutional pillar
supporting a people-centred socio-cultural community.
There have been successes. The most important has been the task of preserving
peace between Member States and avoiding invasion by global powers, with a commitment
to peace in declaring ASEAN as a non-nuclear region. Another has been the ASEAN
declaration of human rights and an Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights
(AICHR). A third has been the rise of ASEAN countries in the Human Development Index
1
(HDI) measurements of life expectancy, education and per capita income . A fourth has
been the ASEAN use of blueprints to achieve ethical goals such as cross-border business
ethics, human mobility, reduction of inequality, sustainability and biodiversity.
However there have also been disappointments. The most prominent during
the writing of this book is ASEAN’s paralysis faced with the coup d’état by the military
Tatmadaw on 1st February 2021. It clearly violated ASEAN’s agreed ethical declarations on
democratic governance and human rights. The Tatmadaw was responsible for intentionally
killing demonstrators, torturing prisoners and bombing entire villages. ASEAN’s ethic of
human development was put into reverse, plunging nearly half of Myanmar’s 55 million
population into poverty. ASEAN was unable to agree on its virtue ethics of freedom and
social progress, its rules-based ethics on human rights, its results-based ethics on human
development and its leadership ethics in taking action.

A new ASEAN voice for ethics

As founder of the ASEAN Human Development Organisation (AHDO), I was aware of
the need for a space or forum of open discussion of ASEAN’s ethical issues. Human

1 United Nations Development Report https://hdr.undp.org/en/content/latest-human-development-index-
ranking

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