Johan B. P. Maramis:
When I was with the Indonesian European University, I received a call
one day from Mr. Kharis Suhud,
Speaker of the Indonesian Parliament and People’s Congress. It was on July
1990.
I happened to know Mr. Kharis Suhud from the time he served as Indonesian ambassador to
Thailand and concurrently Indonesian representative to ESCAP in the
mid-1971. Mr. Kharis Suhud
had called to inform me that he wanted to nominate me as the Indonesian candidate
for the post of Secretary General of the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary organization
(AIPO).
I was very surprised by his offer and jokingly remarked that he might
have called the wrong party by mistake since I have been in retirement for
about ten years. Yet I found it a great honour to be
considered despite having been away from official duty for such a long period.
As it turned out, I was one of the five candidates to be considered for
the position; ultimately the Indonesian parliament selected me. At AIPO’ s
General Assembly session in Singapore in September 1990, I was officially
appointed as the first Secretary General of AIPO for a period of three years.
Promoting the goals of AIPO
The ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Organization consists of the Parliaments
of five ASEAN countries, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore
and Thailand. AIPO was formally established on 2 September 1977 with the
general goal of enhancing friendship and mutual co-operation in matters
affecting Southeast Asia in order to promote regional
peace, stability and prosperity. Specially AIPO intents
to promote closer inter-parliamentary co-operation among the ASEAN member
countries and closer contact and understanding among their members.
In promoting the goals of ASEAN as stipulated in ASEAN Declaration of
August 8, 1967, AIPO believes in the need to concert common efforts toward
giving concrete substance to brotherhood and friendship as well as meeting the
challenges faced by society in this modern age. Its aims itself to address
these common problems through studies, discussions and recommended solutions.
AIPO was organized to address world problems that are growing in scope.
Its Working Committee and General Assembly are held every year with the venue
selected alphabetically on rotational basis among member’s counties.
Brunei although an ASEAN member is not included in AIPO since its
government has no parliament. However it was accorded
special observer status. Besides ASEAN members, other countries having observer
status in the larger ASEAN forum are invited in AIPO as observers.
The
organs of AIPO are the General Assembly, Working committees and the permanent
Secretariat. The Speaker of the parliament of the host country becomes
President until the closing ceremony of the conference in the host country.
Discussions in the General Assembly usually cover subjects in the political and
security, economic, social and organizational fields.
The functions of the Working Committee are among others, to propose the
agenda of the General Assembly to clear and submit draft resolutions and other
recommendations and to prepare the Joint Communiqué.
The Permanent Secretariat of which I became its first head, has a number of functions. It served as the central
administrative office, prepares materials to be submitted to the Working
committee and General Assembly, and carries out all the responsibilities
assigned to it by the General Assembly. The work of the Secretariat was
previously handled by the host parliament. The annual budget is in the amount
of US 150.000 thousand dollars equally divided among the five members, which
worked out to US$ 30.000 per parliament per year. The AIPO Secretariat number 8
which consisted of myself, the Deputy Secretary General, an administrative
officer and clerical staff.
The four committees in AIPO discuss a range of issues covering their
respective fields. In the political field issues which are usually discussed
include international and regional political and security matters, the
endorsement and review of AEAN initiatives such as the Zone of Peace, Freedom
and Neutrality (Zopfan) the question of regional
co-operation and others. The economic committee reviews the progress on
intra-ASEAN economic co-operation and issues such as co-operation in tourism,
whereas the social committee studies issues such as the protection of migrant
workers, protection of children and public health. The organization Committee
discusses internal organizational matters.
It was obvious that with such limited staff and financial resources at
its disposal, the AIPO secretariat could only perform peripheral functions such
as notifying non-members, including governments and international organisations, about AIPO’S decisions and recommendations
of the General Assembly; following up specific recommendations addressed
to the governments and international organizations; acting as the
official channel of communication, maintaining closer contact with ASEAN
secretariat and preparing for the General Assembly session.
Improvements in function and structure
To improve the effective functioning of the Secretariat in my first
session as Secretary General, I proposed to specify and or enlarge the secretariats
function to include the appropriate facilities for the proper functioning of
the central administration office such as a computer network and a central
library to establish a database of pertinent and timely information.
I further
suggested to add a study research function for the secretariat with a view to
conduct analytical research in areas of interest of AIPO, to initiate practical
regional co-operation programs and to draw up short-, medium- and long-term
programs for AIPO.
Another role that the secretariat should play was to act as the
operational arm of AIPO, which would involve the implementation, co-ordination
and monitoring of AIPO decisions and resolutions, in addition to servicing the
committees and the General Assembly.
I also suggested changes in the organization structure to add among
others a Standing Committee to consider the report of the study committees, and
to prepare the agenda and documentation for the General Assembly.
My recommendations were considered premature since these could only be
taken up at the end of my term. I also suggested mobilizing extra-budgetary
resources that I had done successfully at ESCAP to add more staff and to
finance important programs in case the AIPO members were not willing to
increase their contribution. This proposal was also turned down since AIPO
wants to keep the Secretariat deliberately small and less prominent. In this
connection it may be recalled that it took the ASEAN secretariat nearly 25
years before the member governments resolved to expand its role and accord the
Secretary General the rank of minister. It was feared that the secretariat
would become too powerful. I thus had to work within this staffing and
financial constraint and with limited mandate.
After having observed my first AIPO session in Singapore, and based on
my experience in Bangkok, I decided to make certain
changes. I had first to popularised
AIPO. Frankly, I had only a vague idea of what AIPO stood for, when Mr. Kharis Suhud selected me as
candidate for the post. One of my first task was to issue a general information
pamphlet clarifying the aims and purpose of AIPO, and to distribute a quarterly
publication concerning parliamentary news on relevant topics in the ASEAN
countries. I made effective use of the print and broadcast media and gave press
interviews particularly when the AIPO session took place in Jakarta in 1992. Unfortunately however I had to discontinue those efforts
because of lack of funds I also had to prepare AIPO’s annual sessions more
efficiently.
As there were practically no supporting documents available at these
sessions, the discussions were not clearly focussed
on the subject at hand. There were also many items on the agenda that due to
time constraints could only be discussed superficially. I tried to streamline
the agenda but could not get away with dropping some items that the previous
session had requested to continue. I also introduced an annotated agenda for
every subject. The documentation was, however, quoted from official sources in particular from the official ASEAN meetings, since I had
no means of conducting analytical studies.
I had to limit myself to only a few activities that I could implement
usefully within the short period of my 3-year tenure.
I arrange more inter-parliamentary visits as well as visits with
parliaments outside AIPO. In fact I successfully
organized a visit to Thailand, a member of AIPO, and also to the Republic of
China, Vietnam and Laos, all are non-members. Two meetings with the European
Parliament, one of which was convened in Jakarta and the other one in Strassbourg, the seat of the European parliament, took
place during my term.
I was also invited by the Konrad Adenauer stiftung
foundation to visit Germany to learn more about their parliamentary system and
to provide more information about AIPO.
My deputy, myself and another secretariat member of the Philippines
congress were very well received and had an extended tour in Germany. In view
of the success of those early visits, the General Assembly suggested further
visits to the Asian-Pacific region such as North and South Korea, Myanmar and
Cambodia. Furthermore I had to work for further
harmonization for legislation among the
ASEAN members. I concentrated on non-controversial issues that would
constitute a framework for common legalization to be enacted by the respective
member parliaments.
Some important achievements.
Drug legislation
What I considered to be remarkable achievements were the consensus on
two subjects during my terms of office.
The first one concerned drug legalization. With the active support of
the Malaysian parliament, AIPO was able to agree on a number
of important issues that would constitute the framework for legislation
on narcotic and drug abuse and rehabilitation. These included stringent laws
that would effectively combat the production of narcotic, curb drug trafficking
and anti drug abuse, and which would serve as a
deterrent to organized drug syndicates.
Human rights
The second touched upon human rights that formed the basis for a study
committee meeting organized by the Indonesian parliament.
This
study committee in turn was able to draft an ASEAN Declaration on Human rights
that was subsequently approved by AIPO. The Declaration stressed, inter alia,
that human rights were indivisible and comprise civil, political, social and
cultural rights, and should not be addressed selectively but must be promoted
without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion. The Declaration also
stressed that human right has two balancing aspects, those with respect to
rights and freedom of the individual and those that stipulated obligations of
the individuals to society and state. The universal promotion and of human
rights should be placed in the context on international co -operation based on
the concept of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and non-interference
in the internal affairs of states. Development was also considered as a
fundamental right. Growth and stability were linked by an unremitting search
for a balance between the claim of the individual and those of the community to
which the individual belonged and through which many individual rights were
realized.
Subsequently in pursuance to my efforts, AIPO at is session in Manila in
1994 adopted the AIPO Declaration on Environment and Protection of Wild life
that was drafted by a study committee in Jakarta. It also accepted the offer of
the Malaysian AIPO national group to draft common legalisation
pertaining to environment issues.
The General Assembly also agreed to establish an Ad-Hoc committee to
promote mutual understanding and the exchange of information of the laws of
ASEAN member states which Singapore offered to host.
At nearly every General Assembly session the question of an Asian
parliament was raised but regularly postponed, since some of the members were
of the view that an Asian Parliament at this juncture was premature. The Philipppines however persisted and at the session in
Manila, the Assembly mandated the Committee on Organizational Matters to find
ways and means to strengthen legislative co-operation and inter-action in AIPO
and ASEAN and to promote the evolution of AIPO as the core of eventual of ASEAN
legislature in the future.
An ASEAN Parliament should be the final objective of AIPO. By exerting
more efforts on the question of harmonization of legalisation
on a wide range of issues in member parliaments, this objective may indeed be
achieved one day.
Because of the obvious constraints of a small staff and limited financial
resources, and restricted mandate, I could not accomplish as much as I have
wanted in a relatively short period of three years.
I believe, however, that I had contributed to the promotion of closer inter-parliamentary
co-operation among the parliamentarians within and outside AIPO, while
assisting in the general goal of AIPO to enhance friendship and co-operation in
matters of mutual concern.
Posted April 28, 2002
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