Recognizing the importance of inter-parliamentary cooperation in synergizing regional efforts towards tackling shared challenges, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. made several recommendations to allow the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to achieve shared regional aspiration.
“Inter-parliamentary cooperation will synergize regional efforts towards tackling shared challenges such as climate change, transnational threats, and upholding a rules-based international order anchored in international law,” President Marcos said during his intervention in the ASEAN Leaders’ Interface with Representatives from the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA).
“We thank the AIPA for continuing to support our vision for a rules-based, people-oriented, and people-centered ASEAN.”
In his intervention, the President recommended maintaining an open communication and effective collaboration between the executive and legislative bodies to harmonize the laws and regulations across the region.
“Through such a partnership, we can realize in the domestic arena agreed strategies for collaboration and identify laws which are needed to harness new opportunities for the region as well as address emerging regional challenges,” he pointed out.
For instance, Marcos said ASEAN members share the same concerns regarding the increasing misuse of innovative technological applications to facilitate trafficking in persons, a multidimensional issue that needs concerted cooperation between the legislative and executive bodies in order to be resolved.
Creating a robust legal framework and an effective enforcement mechanism that mutually supports each other to reinforce national and regional cooperation against trafficking in persons are needed to address those issues, he said.
President Marcos also raised AIPA’s role as a bridge to connect ASEAN with the people by communicating the importance of a cohesive regional grouping, thereby unifying its members with a stronger sense of one ASEAN vision, one ASEAN Community.
This is necessary because although ASEAN contributed to the remarkable regional socio-economic growth and development since its inception, the peoples’ awareness of ASEAN’s contributions to their own lives might not be well understood.
And against the backdrop of a more volatile and fragmented world, the President encouraged AIPA to enhance the primacy of the voices of the region’s people in AIPA’s collaboration with its foreign partners to advance the aspirations of the people in the region.
AIPA serves as the center of communication and information among Member Parliaments in the ASEAN. It aims to encourage understanding, cooperation, and close relations among Member Parliaments as well as Observer Member Parliaments and other parliamentary organizations.
AIPA also plays and instrumental role in familiarizing the peoples of Southeast Asia with policies aimed at accelerating the realization of an ASEAN Community in 2025. (PND)
