The ASEAN Charter Ten Years On

The ASEAN Charter Ten Years On On 13 January 2007 the High Level Task Force (HLTF) on the Drafting of the ASEAN Charter held its first meeting on the sidelines of the Twelfth ASEAN Summit in Cebu, the Philippines. On 20 November 2007 this author had the honour to present the completed ASEAN Charter for signature by the ASEAN leaders at the Thirteenth ASEAN Summit in Singapore. The Charter was drafted in an inordinately short time — barely ten months elapsed between the first meeting in Cebu and the last meeting in Vientiane in October 2007. The tight time frame for the drafting of the Charter meant that many things were fudged and left to be elaborated later. The aim was to get the building up and the façade nicely painted in time for the Summit, never mind that the plumbing was still in the process of being fixed. A decade on, ASEAN is still tinkering with the plumbing. Boiled down to the essentials, the HLTF had three principal tasks: first, clothe ASEAN with a legal personality; second, establish a proper institutional framework; and third, ensure that there was a mechanism to enforce compliance with the multitudinous agreements, roadmaps, plans of action and declarations that sprouted like mushrooms after every ASEAN Summit and ministerial meeting. The first task was a purely legal undertaking. The lack of a proper legal personality was a practical problem for ASEAN. Donors is David Marshall Professor, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. Postal address: 469G Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259776; email: lawwcm@nus.edu.sg. 01 Roundtable-3P.indd 245 who were inclined to give money had no one to give to. For decades, the ASEAN Secretariat stood in as the recipient. However, for various reasons this was not entirely satisfactory, especially from the point of view of some would-be donors. The solution was simply to declare that ASEAN, as an intergovernmental organization, had a legal personality. The reference to ASEAN as...