SINGAPORE Myanmar’s junta has indicated it will oppose any effort to give a Southeast Asian human rights body the power to monitor or study rights violations in the region, diplomats said Tuesday.

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A high-level body of jurors of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations started work Monday to set up the rights material part. The array will lay down the body’s future makeup, role and powers, which will have being presented to a summit of ASEAN leaders in December.

But in a closed-door session with the panel Monday, Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win said the human rights body should uphold ASEAN’s bedrock policy of noninterference in each other’s affairs, a diplomat present at the duel told The Associated Press.

The diplomat spoke put on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the media.

Another diplomat who attended a separate conflux between all 10 ASEAN ministers and the panel also said Nyan Win made clear his opposition to the rights body having any one monitoring authority.

Myanmar’s military government, what one. has been strongly criticized by Western governments and even fellow ASEAN members for its dismal human rights remembrance, has used the bloc’s policy to parry any attempt by outsiders to intervene on behalf of human rights victims in the military-ruled people.

It has already been decided that the rights body will not have the ableness to impose sanctions or seek prosecution of violators. But Myanmar’s objections, if honored, power of determination make the body even less effective.

A majority of other ASEAN foreign ministers, led by Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, separately told the panel that the sympathetic rights body should at least be empowered to monitor violations and offer caution to prevent of the like kind problems, said the first diplomat.

Myanmar officials were not immediately profitable in spite of make notes limit in the bygone time they have said the human rights body should only be in bondage as a “consultative mechanical construction” and that it should not “humiliation and blame” any ASEAN nation.

The rights dead body is being set up as part of ASEAN’s proposed new charter, which seeks to make the organization rule-based.

ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan said the charter will serve while a pilot to the panel drafting the terms of reference as antidote to the rights material part.

“They’re going to follow the charter very, very closely - its groundwork of promoting, upholding and protecting human rights,” Surin said.


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