Secretary-General of ASEAN
at the
Twenty Seventh ASEANAPOL Conference
Singapore, 2-7 June 2007

Excellencies,

Distinguished Delegates,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

1. I am honoured to join you this morning and to address this distinguished Conference. Allow me to express my sincere appreciation to the Singapore Police Force for this opportunity and for the excellent arrangements made for the ASEAN Secretariat delegates.

2. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank ASEANAPOL for having the ASEAN Secretariat in its annual Conference.  The ASEAN Secretariat has learned much from the ASEANAPOL Annual Conference.

3. I am heartened to observe that in the one decade since its inception in 1997, ASEAN cooperation in combating transnational crime has been steadily moving beyond the confidence-building stage. This is evidenced in the strengthening of institutional and legal frameworks that facilitate such cooperation.

4. Several ASEAN bodies, such as the AMMTC (ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Transnational Crime)/SOMTC (ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting on Transnational Crime), ASEAN Law Ministers Meeting/ASEAN Senior Law Officials Meeting (ASLOM), ASEAN Directors-General of Immigration Departments and Heads of Consular Affairs Divisions of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs (DGICM), ASOD (ASEAN Senior Officials on Drugs Matters) and others have been addressing various cross-cutting issues relating to combating transnational crime.

5. ASCCO (the ASEAN Security Community Plan of Action Coordinating Conference), an annual coordinating meeting of relevant ASEAN bodies involved in the establishment of an ASEAN Security Community (ASC) has been held since 2006. It aims to ensure that those bodies are working in harmony to achieve the goals of ASC, one of the three pillars of ASEAN Community envisioned by our Leaders by 2015. The other two pillars are ASEAN Economic Community and ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community.

6. The establishment of an ASEAN Community will certainly take ASEAN cooperation onto a higher plane and solidify regional integration. To better meet the challenges posed by such integration as well as rapid globalisation, ASEAN is moving towards being a more rules-based organisation with a legal personality. To this end, an ASEAN Charter is being drafted. The Charter will set the framework and lay the legal foundation for ASEAN to restructure the existing mechanism and improve its decision-making process and ensure prompt implementation of all ASEAN decisions. The first draft of the Charter will be submitted to the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in July 2007 and is expected to be signed by our Leaders at their Summit in Singapore in November of this year.

7. Law is indeed the bedrock in which the ASEAN Community will be anchored. In this regard, I am pleased to mention here that key legal instruments that will better facilitate regional cooperation in combating transnational crime have been in place or are being established. The Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters has been signed by all Member Countries in 2006. The Treaty is in the process of entering into force pending ratification by the Member Countries and may be elevated into an ASEAN Treaty once it enters into force. The ASEAN Convention on Counter Terrorism was signed by ASEAN Leaders on 13 January 2007. Follow-up measures on its ratification and implementation will be deliberated at the 7th SOMTC, which will be held in Vientiane, Lao PDR at the end of this month. And a week before that, an ASLOM working group will meet in Bali to start working on the establishment of an ASEAN Extradition Treaty.

8. I would like to emphasise that early ratification of these instruments by the Member Countries and their operational implementation would enhance cooperation among ASEAN aw enforcement agencies in combating transnational crime. However, I am also quite heartened to note that even though those legal instruments have yet to be in force, cooperation between ASEAN law enforcement agencies, particularly through the ASEANAPOL network, has been very close. I have been informed that exchange of information and evidence, witnesses and even hand-over of suspects have been conducted effectively through informal police-to-police cooperation. In this regard, I particularly would like to laud the establishment of the ASEANAPOL Electronic Database System (e-ADS), which was launched last year, as it would facilitate better exchange of information among ASEAN law enforcement agencies.

9. The harnessing of new technology is essential to combat crime, enforce the law and strengthen cooperation across borders against transnational crime.  The use of computers and internet is being extremely undertaken in all sectors of ASEAN cooperation, in particular to build the ASEAN Community.

10. I welcome ASEANAPOL’s efforts to institutionalise the organisation as evidenced by the on-going process to establish an ASEANAPOL Secretariat.  ASEANAPOL has also been establishing institutional linkage with relevant ASEAN bodies such as AMMTC, as demonstrated by the briefing by the Chairman of the 25th ASEANAPOL Conference at the 5th AMMTC held in Ha Noi, Viet Nam in November 2005. As ASEAN deepens its integration, and ASEANAPOL strengthens its structure as an organisation that shoulders the responsibility of enhancing law enforcement cooperation in the region, the two organisations will naturally find more areas of mutual interest for cooperation. I am confident that this Conference would deliver outcomes that would further enhance cooperation towards achieving our common goal of eliminating the threats of transnational crime from the region.

11. I wish the Conference a great success. Thank you.