APR2P-RSIS JOINT SEMINAR on High Level Advisory Panel’s (HLAP) Report on Mainstreaming the Responsibility to Protect in Southeast Asia: Pathway Towards a Caring ASEAN Community by Dr. Surin Pitsuwan, Former ASEAN Secretary General

The S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), jointly with the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (APR2P), organised a public seminar on 7 November 2016. The guest speaker was Dr Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN Secretary-General from 2008 to 2012. The title of his speech was ‘High-Level Advisory Panel’s (HLAP) Report on Mainstreaming the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in Southeast Asia: Pathway Towards a Caring ASEAN Community’. Ambassador Ong Keng Yong, Executive Deputy Chairman of RSIS, moderated the seminar. Associate Professor Mely Caballero-Anthony, Head of RSIS Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies, Professor Alex Bellamy, Director of APR2P, and Mr. Philip Green, Australia’s High Commissioner to Singapore, gave opening and welcoming remarks.

The High-Level Advisory Panel on the Responsibility to Protect in Southeast Asia was established by Dr Pitsuwan in 2013, at the behest of Mr. Adama Dieng, the UN Secretary General’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. The HLAP comprised five eminent persons from Southeast Asia, with Associate Professor Caballero-Anthony and Professor Bellamy as the Secretariat. The HLAP Report was launched in September 2014 in New York and was received by Mr. Dieng and Dr Jennifer Welsh, the UN Secretary General’s Special Adviser on RtoP. The Report outlined recommendations on how ASEAN can promote RtoP. This seminar is part of the outreach activities to disseminate the findings and recommendations of the HLAP Report in the Southeast Asia.