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SEAN is looking inward ahead of its 50th anniversary celebrations later this year, with officials doing a stock-take on a primary document and focusing on responding better to challenges.

Entering its five-year review period this year, technical and senior officials are looking to update the ASEAN Charter by filtering through articles that are up for discussion.

The charter is the core instrument for achieving ASEAN centrality in the region, a current hot topic in light of widespread perceptions that ASEAN does not do enough to address power projections in the region and adapts too slowly to new and emerging challenges.

Kicking off a series of meetings under the banner of the 30th ASEAN Summit in Manila, the Philippines, the ASEAN Council of Permanent Representatives (CPR) met on Tuesday to devise and submit an interim report on articles in the charter that merit updating.

Articles earmarked for review include the frequency of summits, the ASEAN anthem, and Annex 1 and 2 of the charter that lists the various sectoral ministerial bodies and entities associated with ASEAN, Indonesia’s deputy representative to ASEAN Sanga Panggabean said.

“The SOM [senior officials meeting] leaders have shared their views and have asked the CPR to continue its discussions as the working group hasn’t reached consensus over a few articles,” Sanga said on the sidelines of the ASEAN senior officials meeting on Thursday.

A CPR scoping paper from March has limited the scope of the charter review to articles that all ASEAN member-states have agreed to discuss.

Indonesia’s SOM leader Jose AM Tavares warned that updating the document was a huge undertaking that carries widespread consequences, saying that “when we review something, it most likely ends up becoming a drawn-out process; all ten ASEAN member states have to ratify [the changes].”

He argued the charter update was in line with ASEAN’s assessment of what aspects need strengthening after 50 years of its existence.

Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi pointed out that the bloc was in fact the key factor in maintaining peace and security in Southeast Asia.

“It has been 50 years since ASEAN was founded, but its achievements throughout the decades have been taken for granted, as if peace and security simply falls from the sky,” Retno told reporters ahead of Friday’s ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM).

“So we are happy that after 50 years, ASEAN is able to create an ecosystem of peace and prosperity for the region that contributes to regional peace and security.”

ASEAN foreign ministers immediately proved Retno’s point after the AMM, as the meeting produced a strong united statement on the situation in the Korean Peninsula, where tensions have continued to stoke fears as North Korea insists on carrying out multiple nuclear and missile launch tests, to the detriment of other countries in the region.

The ASEAN foreign ministers statement expressed the bloc’s “grave concern over the escalation of tension,” noting Pyongyang’s two nuclear tests last year and subsequent ballistic missile launches. “ASEAN is mindful that instability in the Korean Peninsula seriously impacts the region and beyond,” said Friday’s AMM statement.

Malaysia Foreign Minister Najib Razak lauded the success of 50-year-old ASEAN in expanding its collective GDP to about US$2.7 trillion, from $87 billion four decades ago, and said the region could become the world’s fourth-largest economy, as reported by Reuters.

He later also warned that economic disparity could be politically destabilizing.