The Latest Breaking News from ASEAN

PHNOM PENH: Southeast Asian foreign ministers will seek ways to help calm rising tensions over Taiwan at regional talks Wednesday, after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived on the island, enraging Beijing.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will be forced to reconsider a peace plan agreed with Myanmar if the country's military rulers execute more prisoners, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said on Wednesday.

ASEAN ministers meet a week after the military hanged four activists, but look unlikely to take a tougher line.

Since August 2017, rampant persecution and violence in Myanmar's Rakhine state has pushed hundreds of thousands of Muslim minority people, known as the Rohingya, to abandon their homes and seek sanctuary in Bangladesh. According to the United Nations' estimation, 200,000 Myanmar civilians have already sought refuge in Bangladesh following prior…

Most ASEAN countries want a united front on a code of conduct for the South China Sea, but critics claim Beijing, which wants to handle negotiations on a country-by-country basis, has used Cambodia to thwart progress on an agreement and to block diplomatic opposition to its maritime claims.

Southeast Asian foreign ministers are gathering in the Cambodian capital for meetings addressing violence in Myanmar and other issues

In the post-Cold War era in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has always been an important weathervane in demonstrating the state of "realpolitik" in the region. Therefore, the recent diplomatic flurry of high-profile visits by Indonesian President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, shows the country's efforts to stay ahead of today's…

YANGON: Myanmar's military chief Sr Gen Min Aung Hlaing said Monday that some points of a consensus reached between the junta and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to end the country's ongoing crisis will be implemented this year.

Malaysia is set to lead a push for tougher action on Myanmar when a regional bloc of foreign ministers meet this week, as anger mounts at the junta for stonewalling crisis resolution efforts.

Myanmar will not be represented at an international gathering of foreign ministers in Cambodia this week, a spokesperson for the ASEAN chair said on Monday, after its military rulers declined a proposal to send a non-junta representative instead.

While the rest of the world continues to be preoccupied by Covid-19 and fallout from Russia-Ukraine war, the downward spiral of Myanmar continues. A once-promising frontier market risks slipping into a Sri Lanka-like economic crisis, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis created by the cruelty of its military junta.