Today in New York the High-level Advisory Panel on the Responsibility to Protect in Southeast Asia will present its initial report to the UN. The title is “Mainstreaming the Responsibility to Protect in Southeast Asia: Pathway towards a Caring ASEAN Community”. The five-member panel was established in April 2013 in response to a UN request. It is chaired by Dr Surin Pitsuwan, former Secretary-General of ASEAN, and supported by a secretariat comprising Professor Alex Bellamy from the University of Queensland, and Professor Mely Caballero Anthony from Nanyang Technological University. It regards this report as the first of many R2P steps.

It has to be said that no more than a baby step is taken here. Over the past few days only the introduction and executive summary have been available online. Clearly, though, the full report will not diverge much from the very brief document in which they appear. The main message that emerges is this: R2P is a perfect fit with everything ASEAN is already doing. This is from page 1: “The concepts and norms of the Responsibility to Protect converge with ASEAN’s vision of a peaceful, just, democratic, people-centered and caring community in Southeast Asia.” This is from pages 2-3: “promoting the Responsibility to Protect is a logical extension of ASEAN’s own commitment to building a responsible, caring community that supports its members to protect its peoples, promotes their well-being, respects their human rights and ensures their security.”

The report does make some recommendations for raising R2P awareness throughout ASEAN, and for building both state and civil society capacity to deal with problems. That’s good. Overall, though, little is said to indicate how R2P might dovetail with ASEAN’s foundational norm of non-interference. Instead, the report contents itself mainly with rather meaningless blather. This is, for instance, the first sentence: “Mainstreaming the Responsibility to Protect in Southeast Asia could make a significant contribution to the establishment of a ‘sharing and caring’ ASEAN Community, which the Association’s Member States aspire to achieve in 2015.” You read that and understand immediately that you shouldn’t set your sights too high.