ASEAN to rethink peace plan with Myanmar if political executions continue News
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ASEAN to rethink peace plan with Myanmar if political executions continue

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will reconsider its role in the five-point peace plan with Myanmar if its military junta continues to execute prisoners, ASEAN chair Hun Sen of Cambodia said Wednesday at the opening of the ASEAN foreign ministers meeting in Phnom Penh.

This announcement comes in the wake of the military junta’s execution of four political activists in July despite international outcry and a personal plea by Hun Sen for clemency.

The Consensus, which Myanmar’s military junta agreed to in April 2021, calls for an “immediate cessation of violence” in Myanmar and “constructive dialogue” to come to peaceful solutions. It also assigns an ASEAN envoy to Myanmar and provides for humanitarian assistance. The Consensus was passed after widespread violence that followed the February 1 military coup last year.

Hun Sen said at the meeting that there had been some progress in meeting the Consensus goals including in providing humanitarian aid, but that the Consensus had “not advanced to everyone’s wishes” and that the current situation could be seen as even worse than before the peace agreement.

Various ASEAN member countries have called on ASEAN to take stronger action against the Myanmar junta to reach the goals of the Consensus.

In January Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said to Hun Sen that there had not been “any significant progress” in the Consensus’s implementation since its adoption, expressing doubt that the ASEAN chair’s plan for ceasefire would work because ASEAN and its special envoy did not have access to “all parties.”

Malaysia last week called the executions a “mockery” of the Consensus in a news conference. It called for Myanmar to be banned from sending political representatives to any international ministerial level meetings and for ASEAN to engage with the National Unity Government, the shadow administration outlawed by the military junta. Malaysia will present a framework for the implementation of the Consensus at the meeting.

Myanmar military spokesman Zaw Min Tun defended the executions last Tuesday against the international outcry. “If we compare their sentence with other death penalty cases, they have committed crimes for which they should have been given death sentences many times,” he said at a regular press briefing.

A total of 113 people remain on death row in Myanmar. Prior to these four executions, the country has not implemented capital punishment in decades.

Follow JURIST’s Myanmar dispatches, from on-the-ground law students, here.