The establishment of the Asean Economic Community (AEC) has far-reaching implications. The new regional trade bloc not only turns Southeast Asia into one of the world's largest communities, but also promises overall economic growth.
Yet the sustainable path towards a truly rules-based and secure community requires much more than policies and plans to implement economic blueprints.
Asean members need to ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to effectively deal with old and new challenges as the result of economic integration and increased cross-border mobility.
The success of Asean integration will, therefore, be decided by matrices that reflect both economic and social factors. The capacity of the community as a whole to deal with cross-border threats will probably be one of the key factors. A balanced approach to border management is needed in order to safely promote trade facilitation by putting in place mechanisms that ensure and maintain security.
Kittipong Kittayarak, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ). He was formerly the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice of Thailand. This article is an adaptation of his address at the Regional Conference on Enhancing Cooperation on Border Management in Asean, organised by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) and the Department of Asean Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Bangkok during 25-26 April 2016.
Against the backdrop of increased connectivity within the region and with other regions, the Regional Conference on Enhancing Cooperation on Border Management in Asean recently held in Bangkok was a welcome initiative, as it provided a timely forum for policy-makers and practitioners to discuss challenges and proposals for practical solutions.
At the meeting, the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ) revealed the preliminary findings of its joint research undertaken with the Turin-based United Nations research institute called UNICRI. The subject matter of the research addressed how prepared we are as a community to deal with transnational organised crime.
According to the TIJ-UNICRI research, there is good and bad news. While Asean leaders and senior police officers have developed an increasingly comprehensive regional framework for security cooperation since the late 1990s, there is still a significant gap between the Asean policy level and the national practitioner level. Relevant Asean policies remain largely unimplemented.
Several factors were identified that help explain why these policies fail to get filtered into national strategies and reach frontline officers. First, they often do not reflect realities on the ground, failing to take into account practical circumstances and cultural barriers. Second, they remain embedded in redundant and time-consuming bureaucratic processes. On top of that, we have found that the resources allocated to translate these formal policies into practice were far from being enough.
When taking a closer look at border management, it was found that the capacity of border control officers to effectively cooperate with their cross-border counterparts is challenged by four major and very concrete limitations.
Communication represents a major challenge. The poor proficiency in English and foreign regional languages among law enforcers in many Asean countries significantly undermines cross-border cooperation. In preparing for Asean integration, relevant national agencies have allocated very limited resources for the language training of their personnel, and there is no Asean programme in place in this regard.
Cultural barriers contribute greatly to such impediments. There is a general lack of trust among foreign counterparts. We also have a limited knowledge of other countries' culture and working methods. We also tend to think and behave under the old motto of "non-interference in domestic matters" which has largely characterised the Asean community. As a consequence, the current level of information exchange, not only across borders but also at the intra- and inter-agency levels, is not adequate to deal with the threats posed by organised crime in our region. Current regulations impose significant restrictions on the exchange of information and time-consuming formal processes of authorisation to share intelligence.
Significant disparities in law enforcement capacity within the 10 Asean nations, reflecting broader disparities in socio-economic development, were also identified as a limitation to coordinated border control. Such disparities are combined with differences in domestic legal frameworks and with a limited mutual knowledge of the counterpart's laws and procedures. For example, the 10 Asean members have enacted inconsistent laws and operating procedures on extradition, making mutual legal assistance unlikely in many cases.
Complex and time-consuming bureaucratic processes continue to plague the proper cooperation mechanisms. It is usually the case where relevant officers need to go through several stages of validation at the headquarter level. Our research team was told that the official approval of a cooperation request can take up to one year. As a result, although there are numerous formal cooperation mechanisms in place and formal meetings are organised frequently enough (particularly in the Asean context), informal cooperation based on personal contacts and trust on a bilateral basis still prevails.
While TIJ-UNICRI research is still progressing, in my opinion, these preliminary findings represent a direct call for urgent action in the following areas: Instead of focusing on formal polices and institutional frameworks for security cooperation, consisting of meetings, declarations, plans of action and MoUs, a more practical approach in policy making focusing on front-line concrete actions and a monitoring mechanism for implementation are greatly needed.
In addition, investing in socio-cultural integration and confidence-building as a facilitator for bilateral and regional cooperation is essential. Language and cultural barriers, and the lack of trust are key impediments to information sharing and joint operations. A combination of language skills development and community building can pave the way for a sense of shared responsibility and encourage practitioners to join hands in dealing with common threats.
In parallel, development of substantive and logistical enablers of better information sharing should be encouraged. Improvement of data collection and information management capacities within relevant agencies; and the establishment of streamlined platforms for information sharing both at the regional and the local levels on the other hand are two concrete areas worth considering.
There is a continued need for harmonising domestic crime control-related laws, operating procedures and capacity as a prerequisite for enabling cooperation. Joint border control is greatly challenged by inconsistencies in criminalisation, investigative techniques and bureaucratic arrangements on both sides of the border. Committing ourselves to adopt and implement standard legislation, training, information management and operating procedures for cooperation at the border would represent a major step forward with high political significance.
In all, I believe that in pursuit of the right balance between promoting greater connectivity through the facilitation for cross-border trade movement and protecting citizens from the threats of transnational crime and other non-traditional threats, it is imperative that we must have a strong and reliable criminal justice system as a prerequisite for any further cooperation.
Asean countries have and always will be driven, to a certain extent, by differing interests and priorities, but we can and should always try to find the commonalities that we can work on together for the purpose of empowering our regional community.
Failure to balance this success in achieving our common goal to counter threats to our security may be a difficult hurdle to overcome.