Leaders adopt roadmap to form regional community

Asean leaders signed the Cha-am Hua Hin Declaration on the Roadmap for the Asean Community (2009-2015) to ensure peace, stability and prosperity in the region.

The Asean community comprised three pillars: a political-security community, economic community and a socio-cultural community.

The leaders adopted and acknowledged a number of documents, including blueprints for the political-security and the socio-cultural communities.

The group had adopted already a blueprint for an economic community in the previous summit in Singapore in 2007.

The summit at the beach resort of Cha-am was the first since Asean introduced its charter. The group would activate all organs and mechanisms under the charter by the end of this year, said Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, as chairman of the summit.

Mechanisms included the establishment of an Asean human rights body by the next summit at the end of this year, he said.

Asean leaders praised the role of Prime Minister Abhisit as chairman of the group in conducting the summit, with Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi commending his role.

"Prime Minister Abhisit conducted it very well, focusing on the issues we are discussing," Abdullah said after the meeting.

During the three-day summit, leaders put their efforts into turning the group into a people-centred organisation, meeting representatives of youth, civil society and the business sector.

Asean was able to make progress beyond expectation on the issue of the Rohingya boat people when they discussed the plight of the illegal migrants in the Indian Ocean.

The plight of the Rohingya was highlighted by the summit after Thailand, accused of towing the refugees out to sea, raised the issue with Asean members.

 Burma's delegates agreed to take the boat people back if they could be proved Bengali ethnic from Burma.

In the chairman's statement after the summit, the leader avoided using the term "Rohingya", preferring to call them illegal migrants in the Indian Ocean. Prime Minister Abhisit said the cover-all term could apply to all boat people from the area, whatever their ethnicity.

Asean agreed to put the issue of illegal migrants into a regional context, bringing the problem up for discussion at the Bali Ministerial Conference on people smuggling, trafficking in persons and related transnational crimes at Indonesia's Bali resort in April.

The Asean secretary-general was assigned to coordinate with Burma in verifying the identity of the boat people.