The ASEAN lawyers
PHILIPPINE President Rodrigo Roa Duterte hosted the ASEAN Law Association (ALA) commemorative session at Malacañang Palace last Wednesday, October 25. President Duterte exhorted the ASEAN community of lawyers to continue exchanging best practices among its members, and expressed the hope that ALA would help address the regional scourge of poverty, transnational crimes, and terrorism.
While listening to the President, I couldn’t help but look back to ALA’s birth 37 years ago and its inauguration in November, 1980, in Manila. I tell myself, “ALA can rise to the President’s challenge!” ALA has grown since then in stature and influence. A nongovernmental agency, it is an influential opinion leader. Its distinctive composition and decision-making style match ASEAN values and sensibilities.
On November 23, 1980, I wrote in the Manila Bulletin:
“The ALA is unique in the composition of its membership and in the character of its collective leadership. Judges, lawyers from government, members of academe and the practicing Bar, from all the ASEAN states, are represented in the Governing Council, the highest policy-making body of the Association.
“…We predict that the ALA will become the most effective vehicle for regional friendship and cooperation of all the non-governmental bodies within the ASEAN. The laws of a country reflect the social structure, the traditions, the values, and the moral consciousness of its people. The fastest way to achieve mutual understanding in this context is through the mutual study of each other’s legal systems.
“An association like the ALA, structured in its rules and objectives to fit ASEAN sensitivities and values, is better placed than any other organization to attain this goal.”
The subsequent admission of Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar further enriched that uniqueness. ASEAN’s leaders avowed goal in the next 50 years is deepening and broadening integration. Much work still has to be done in eliminating nontariff barriers, ensuring labor mobility, “ASEANizing” university student body and faculty. In one word, lifting a supermajority of the 630 million peoples to middle class status by closing the inequality gap.